Monday, January 11, 2016

End of Days (1999)

I started this year with somewhat religious horror theme. When I saw End of Days was available I had no choice but write about it. I am not planning to continue this theme for whole month. I have Doctor Who's and Sherlock's Christmas episodes to review.

End of Day tries to take advantage of the year 2000 end of the world scare. 2000 was supposed to be the year when world ends because we went to new millennium. Scare also resulted one of the all time best tv-series Millennium. Too bad End of Days is not as good.

Movie revolves around devil wanting to impregnate one certain woman. This would cause end of the world. Catholic sect want to prevent this by killing the woman. Arnold's character widowed alcoholic cop is thrown into the mix. He ends up trying to keep woman alive and not pregnant.

It is hard to pinpoint why End of Days doesn't work as good as sum of its parts. Some effects are terribly dated but that is not the issue. More I think about it I feel Arnold was miscast in this movie. He wasn't in his most muscular shape but he was still quite muscular for his role. His character was probably changed to better suit him. This made movie weird mix of horror and action.

Aliens and Predator have shown us horror and action can be mixed but End of Days doesn't mix them same way. Arnold's character was written to be alcoholic human wreck. In movie he turns out to be one man killing machine. This change tone of the movie too much during action scenes. Arnold doesn't have one liners but half of the time he is action hero and other half what the character was originally.

Probably all blame is not on Arnold who does quite good job in his role. I just can't stop thinking what would someone like Bruce Willis have done in this role. End of Days is not a bad movie. There is nothing bad in it. It has ingredients to be much better movie. Now it is only a average movie.

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