End of Days (1999)

End Of Days  (2/10)

I have no objection to mindless action movies, but End Of Days is so truly brain-dead, so utterly moronic, that it sets a miserable new benchmark of awfulness for Hollywood blockbusters. Compares to End Of Days, Die Hard was Hamlet and True Lies was Finnegans Wake. The film is not technically incompetent like some zero-budget straight-to-video actioner, but is a big-budget mainstream Hollywood studio production directed by dependable journeyman Peter Hyams all of which makes the direness of this movie much more depressing.

Arnold Schwartzenegger plays security man Jericho Cane (Jericho Religious reference. Geddit?) who is part of the team protecting a mysterious figure whom they suspect is a powerful Wall St. businessman. He is actually the Devil, who has come to earth and taken the human form of Gabriel Byrne. Lucifer is on a mission to impregnate a young woman, chosen from birth to bear his demonic offspring, thus fulfilling a biblical prophecy and bringing about the end of days. For reasons unexplained, the diabolic coupling must take place on the stroke of midnight on 31st December 1999. We know all this, but Cane doesn't, so his departure into action-movie cliche-land makes no sense. But then nothing much makes sense in this movie. The selected Bride of Satan (played by Robin Tunney) is called Christine York. The way in which Cane figures out this name is as staggeringly stupid as the explanation by Father Kovak (played by an suitably embarrassed-looking Rod Steiger) that the number of the beast is not 666, but is actually 1999 because that's what you get when you turn 666 upside-down and stick a 1 in front. Sheesh.

Having mysteriously decided to track down some unknown woman, and amazingly concluded what her name is, Cane turns up just in time to save her from a Vatican hit-squad. (Trust me, I cannot possibly make this movie sound any more stupid than it actually is.) Then all he has to do is protect the virginal Miss York's honour and thereby save the world. Arnie's limitations as an actor are cruelly exposed by the script, which laughably attempts to draw Cane as complex character wrestling with his loss of faith after the deaths of his wife and daughter. Gabriel Byrne is actually rather good, and is the only person involved in this piece of junk who survives with credibility intact.

I do not know how much Andrew H. Marlowe was paid for his original screenplay, but whatever it was, it was too much. This crude amalgam of The Exorcist, The Omen, and Terminator 2 could have been written by any college student with a free weekend and a supply of beer and pizza.

Truly terrible. (2/10) 

-- Gary Jones Homepage: www.bohr.demon.co.uk PGP public key available from servers (DH/DSS key ID: 0x11EAE903)