DIRECTOR
Peter Hyams
SCREENWRITER
Andrew
W. Marlowe
PRODUCERS
Armyan Bernstein
Bill Borden
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Peter Hyams
MUSIC
John Debney
EDITORS
Jeff Gullo
Steven Kemper
CAST
Arnold Schwarzenegger (Jericho Cane)
Gabriel Byrne (Satan)
Robin Tunney (Christine York)
Kevin Pollak (Chicago)
CCH Pounder (Detective Francis)
Udo Kier (Head Priest)
Rod Steiger (Father Kovak)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 121m
U.S. release: November 24, 1999
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Official
website
Other Peter
Hyams movies
reviewed on this website:
- The
Relic
|
Near
the beginning of the entertainingly trashy End of Days,
the big bad guy himself -- Satan, looking remarkably like a translucent
CGI blob -- swoops through the streets of Manhattan. Because
this is a big-budget action-thriller, his arrival is heralded
by exploding gas mains, exploding cars -- just a whole lot of
explosions. Satan whooshes around the city for a while before
he spots a well-dressed man through the window of a posh restaurant,
who very much resembles Gabriel Byrne. Satan chooses to occupy
this man -- a Wall Street banker -- for no apparent reason except
that he's Gabriel Byrne, man; he just looks so cool
in that black coat.
End of Days is best seen, and enjoyed, as the ultimate
high-concept crap: the main millennial event in Madison Square
Garden, the fight of the century -- Arnold Schwarzenegger vs.
Satan. Until it bogged down in a lot of clichéd hand-wringing
about faith (as well as a batch of largely cheesy effects), I
had bad fun with it. Schwarzenegger is Jericho Cane (check the
initials), a bitter, alcoholic ex-cop whose sweet-faced wife
and daughter were killed because he wasn't home to protect them
from thugs; that pushes absentee-father guilt about as far as
it can go. Jericho, it seems, used to believe in God until his
dual loss taught him that God can be a real dick sometimes. The
movie is set up so that Jericho must regain his faith in order
to defeat Satan. (As usual, only Christian faith will do the
trick.)
It's the last few days of December 1999, and Satan has travelled
here for both business and pleasure: In the final hour of the
millennium, he must impregnate a woman who has been marked to
bear his spawn. That woman is the cutely named Christine York
(Robin Tunney, a good actress who seems rather lost here), who
has nightmarish apocalyptic visions; this being the '90s, she's
on a bunch of medications under the supervision of priest/therapist
Udo Kier, though if my therapist were Udo Kier, I wouldn't
take Xanax or even aspirin on his advice. Jericho must find and
protect Christine before Satan can capture her and show her his
"oh" face.
Arnie is Teutonically amusing as always; this movie requires
its own leap of faith, as most of Arnie's movies do -- that people
can live and work alongside him without ever noticing that he's
Arnold Schwarzenegger. (His standard unimpressed schlumpy partner
is played here by Kevin Pollak.) And he's been given a terrific
nemesis in Gabriel Byrne, who seems to take his cue from "Sympathy
for the Devil"; an eminently reasonable man, Satan is witty
and seductive, and Andrew Marlowe's script leaves out the usual
rhetorical pomp. "We'll rule side by side," Satan promises
Jericho. "It'll be so cool." The always engaging
Byrne plays Satan as a guy who keeps himself entertained -- what
good is being evil if it isn't fun?
Of course, we've seen 1,001 variations on this conflict; the
bloated climax feels like a megabudget version of every season
finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Part of the degraded
charm of End of Days is its buffet-table derivative approach
-- it's not shy about scooping a little Omen here, a bit
of Seven
there, and the movie's tone owes a lot to the fin-de-siecle
paranoia of Strange
Days. There's even a ridiculous helicopter-chase scene
early in the movie that has practically nothing to do with the
plot, as if this were a James Bond film, with Satan as the all-time
diabolical villain. End of Days is the sort of pulpy claptrap
you might have caught as the second feature at a drive-in 20
years ago. As such, it has a certain shitheaded appeal: If you're
going to make a big, goofy action-thriller about the millennial
coming of Satan, you might as well hire Schwarzenegger and go
all the way with it. |