End of Days (1999)

* out of ****

Year: 1999 (or is it 6661? I could be reading it upside-down.) Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gabriel Byrne, Robin Tunney, Kevin Pollack, CCH Pounder, Renee Olstead, Rod Steiger, Derrick O'Connor, Miriam Margolyes, Udo Keir Written by Andrew W. Marlowe Directed by Peter Hyams Rated R

And I thought "Stigmata" would be the worst religiously-oriented thriller released this year. Turns out I was wrong, because while "Stigmata" was merely boring and self-important, "End of Days" is completely inept on all fronts. It's a silly, incomprehensible, endlessly stupid mess. For a guy like me who grew up watching Arnold Schwarzenegger at his best, it's extremely disconcerting to see where the big man has ended up. For the first time in recent memory, an Arnold action movie (and "Batman & Robin" doesn't count) is no fun at all. "End of Days" is a major stinker.

The movie opens in Vatican City, 1979. Some Catholic priests have observed an ancient prophecy, which says that a girl will be born on that night that Satan will have targeted for impregnation. If he impregnates her between 11 and midnight on December 31, 1999, the world will be destroyed. The pope orders protection of this girl, though some priests believe she ought to be killed. In New York, that very night, a girl is born to fulfill the prophecy. Twenty years later, we meet Jericho Cane (Schwarzenegger), a suicidal ex-cop with a drinking problem. Now working as a security guard for hire, he is protecting a local businessman (Gabriel Byrne), who is actually possessed by the devil. An assassination attempt on the businessman by a crazed former priest leads him to the girl Satan is after, Christine York (Robin Tunney). Recognizing elements of his own murdered daughter in Christine (including ownership of the same music box, apparently), Jericho swears to protect her against the devil and the faction of priests looking to kill her.

There are so many problems with this film it's hard to know where to begin, but how about starting with the concept? Casting Arnold in a role like this was a mistake to begin with. Schwarzenegger is a persona, not an actor, so putting him in a role that contradicts his usual strong personality is a bad idea. Arnold has neither the dramatic range nor the speaking ability to pull off a character tormented by conflicting emotions. In other words, trying to give him dimension was a mistake. Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, or even Bruce Willis could have played this role (they've all played noble and flawed heroes), but not Schwarzenegger. There are several scenes that attempt to establish Jericho's character; one has him contemplating suicide, another crying over the loss of his wife and daughter, and even one in which the devil tries to tempt him into revealing Christine's location by offering him his old life back. None of these scenes really work, because Arnie isn't up to the task. The filmmakers would have been better off making Jericho a strong, confident character (like the Terminator, for example), the likes of which Schwarzenegger has excelled in before. This one isn't at all believable the way Arnold plays him.

The supporting cast tries their hardest, and only Gabriel Byrne makes any impact at all. As the Prince of Darkness, he's suave and confident. He acts like one would expect the devil to act. The problem is that the script has him doing things that make no sense (more on that later) and that undermines him as a powerful villain. Byrne out-performs Arnold in every scene they have together (including the aforementioned temptation bit), but this is problematic when it causes the audience to start doing the unthinkable: root for the devil. Byrne's speech about the Bible being "overrated" actually starts to make sense, mainly because Arnold's attempts at refuting it (mostly of the "'tis not!" variety) are feeble at best. The only problem is, Arnold has to win, so in the end, nobody really cares. Kevin Pollack plays Jericho's security guard sidekick and tries to liven things up with some comic asides, but like most bad action movie sidekicks, he disappears after about an hour. Robin Tunney isn't given much to do except look scared. In fact, all of the supporting players are good actors, but none, save for Byrne, is given anything interesting to do.

Performances aside, it would be really hard to enjoy this film no matter who starred in it. This being an action blockbuster, it's no surprise that the worst thing about it is the script, which starts off totally confusing, and when some of it is explained (and not much of it is), it's utterly ridiculous. Why is the devil coming on New Year's Eve, 1999? Because it's exactly 1000 years after the year of the devil, which isn't 666, it turns out. Some nutty priest accidentally read it upside down, so the real year is 999, so just add a 1 to the beginning, and you've got 1999! If you don't buy this explanation, you're not alone. It's convoluted and silly at the same time. The method by which Jericho locates Christine York is equally ludicrous (she's Christine, see, and she lives in New York, see . . .), and if that weren't bad enough, there's plenty of bothersome stuff in this film that isn't explained at all. Why can Satan kill everyone he passes on the street, but when it comes to snuffing out one drunk ex-cop, he's powerless? Is he impervious to only one kind of bullet? How come he can't control Jericho or Christine? And how did those Gregorian monks deal with time zones in their prophecies? A clumsy attempt at a joke is made about this, but it's never actually explained.

Usually, this sort of thing wouldn't matter in a Schwarzenegger flick (I mean, don't get me started on the time paradoxes offered up by the Terminator movies), but this time the plot inconsistencies stand out even more than usual because the action is rarely exciting. There are several predictable horror film clichés present in "End of Days," complete with the old "black cat hiding in a cabinet" bit, not that we ever find out what the cat was doing in there. It gets so formulaic that it's possible for those uninterested in being scared to close their eyes at the precise moment a "boo" will come. Their predictions will rarely be wrong. The more grandiose action sequences are utterly charmless, partially because we don't care about these characters (due to the script's pathetic attempts at characterization and setup), and also because they, too, don't make any sense. There's a scene where Schwarzenegger gets thrown around a room by a little old lady. It's good for a few chuckles, but not much else. Supposedly we're to believe she now has super strength by virtue of being controlled by Satan, but the script never sets that up, so the scene is merely silly. None of this is terribly exciting, because all the action sequences are so badly framed that it's often hard to tell why it's happening in the first place, not to mention that they're edited in full-on incomprehensible MTV quick-cut style. Most of them had me scratching my head, rather than saying, "Wow, cool!"

"End of Days" is not only silly and confusing, but it's also distinctly unpleasant to watch. The devil apparently doesn't operate in the more subtle, I'll-convince-people-to-kill-each-other fashion outlined in the Bible, but instead enjoys killing people gruesomely in broad daylight. This doesn't only make him an awfully predictable sort, but it also means that not a single scene in "End of Days" goes by without unnecessarily graphic violence, or the odd kinky sexual encounter (yet another bit that had me scratching my head). If violence is supposed to be shocking, it's not a good idea to throw so much of it into a movie that the audience goes numb. Scenes aren't connected through any reasonable means, so a lot of the time, stuff gets blown up, or people get killed, and I had no idea why. Reasons? To hell with reasons! Let's just blow stuff up! Isn't it cool? Nope, not by a long shot.

This film is thoroughly unwatchable. It's dull, interminable, and unrelenting in its stupidity. Perhaps Arnold needs to make some movies with James Cameron to revive his career, because it's not happening with hack Peter Hyams here. "End of Days" might have had camp value, if only it didn't top itself off with an overly pious ending that nobody's going to buy. If the movie is going to be serious, the filmmakers should have come up with a decent script. If it's going to be campy, Arnold shouldn't be taking himself so damn seriously (I didn't actually see him put up on a cross, did I?), and his character shouldn't be such a sad sack. As it stands, "End of Days" is just a bad movie, and an awfully gloomy one at that.

-reviewed by Shay Casey

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