End Of Days

This was at the end of a long film, when by all ordinary standards we should have been gladly on our way home, but somehow it worked - it was just more fun.

Well the End Of Days, the latest Arnold Scwarzenneger starring vehicle, lives and especially dies on the other end of the Arnie Spectrum. It takes only a few minutes to realise that this flick is rubbish and won't recover.

And it reportedly cost $100 Million U.S. to make! How can you spend so much money and come up with a dud?

Just goes to show that the movie moguls aren't as smart as they'd like to have their share holders believe.

I think that we can safely not blame Arnold Scwarzenneger. He's been in enough successful films and shown his wit and intelligence, not to mention his muscles, often enough to not slate this debacle to him.

The Terminator films, True Lies, Twins, Kindergarten Cop, Total Recall, The Last Action Hero, Junior and Predator have long established his screen presence and in particular his

ability to gently mock himself. And it doesn't appear that Arnie has got too old for parts like the drunken ex cop/action hero he plays in End Of Days. He looks fine and doesn't look like he's lost his touch.

But a woeful script, which gives the appearance of having been half completed, sank this sad ship well and truly.

Perhaps the script was hurried because End Of Days is set in the last weeks of 1999 and to open in late 1999. I can right now appreciate the pressure of end of year deadlines!

There isn't much that is new in this film. It's full of cliches. The devil is attempting to take over the world. This for some reason happens every 1000 years. In addition the insurrection has some ridiculous conditions.

Satan has to sire a child with an appropriately anointed and prepared woman in the last hour before the end of each 1000 years. This allows Satan to be appropriately lascivious and in a hurry, a somewhat fraught condition.

I'd expect you'd agree.

He whooshes forth in something of the style of the Terminators well known to movie fans and then takes over a male body so that he can have congress with his bride.

Scwarzenegger playing Jericho Cane (note the initials) gets mixed up in the deal when a crazed priest tries to kill the body in which Satan has chosen to do his evil deeds (played by Gabriel Byrne).

Jericho Cane is some sort of unofficial, reluctant (Lethal Weapon) bodyguard.

The woman (Christine played by Robin Tunney, The Craft) is of course young and pretty and you can see just where this

film is going. There will be hooded priests (headed by Rod Steiger of all people) and a wise cracking sidekick for Arnie (the very good Kevin Pollack).

A lot of the action will happen in churches and the regulation, true, "terrifying" appearance of Satan will appear in front of the altar at the climax of the film. And of course Arnie will win.

There were some good moments. Satan's description of God as a woeful under achiever with good Public Relations was cute and some of the fighting sequences were O.K. but there are major glitches and they destroy the enjoyment of the movie.

Very often the action is just not believable. For instance there's an early sequence when Arnie is suspended on a rope from a helicopter while he chases a villain, but the surrounding crowd hardly seem to notice.

The chopper is shot at from point blank range with almost no effect. A number of times gunmen lurch into the action from no where with alarmingly good timing.

Again and again baseball bat wielding thugs appear strangely on cue and do almost nothing. It's sometimes like a badly worked out, inept, amateur theatrical presentation.

And Satan seems to be able to alternately take major hits from bullets, throw big men across rooms, and then let himself be thrown out of a window!

End Of Days within it's first twenty minutes loses credibility and then doesn't improve. And as an ultimate insult it features a particularly tasteless scene, one that is certainly not unique in the annuls of movie land, but one that I wish the cliché scroungers would shift to the bottom of the drawer to be never again exposed.

The thrust of End Of Days is the rape of a woman. Why should this yet again be the instrument and the substance of the prize, even for the Devil?