Schwarzenegger Angst - - End of Days
Genre: Action/Horror
Grade: B
The film enters on the Pope and a group of cardnals who are being informed that "she" is being born that night in 1979. Switch to a woman giving birth in New York. The nurse takes the baby stating that they have to wash her up. Instead, the nurse takes the baby to the basement where she is examined for an omega sign and is given her first meal - snake blood. Fast forward to December 28, 1999. A transparent form bursts from the sewers and goes flying down the street, later to take over the body of a stockbroker (Gabriel Byrne). Satan is in town, and he's looking to get laid. After a long drawn-out entry action scene, Arnold gets the goal of protecting this now 20 year-old girl (Robin Tunney) from the devil and his evil menions. Satan must sire the anti-christ with woman by midnight of December 31 or he will have to wait another thousand years.
Now I have been an Arnold Schwarzenegger fan since Terminator and Conan came out, and up until a few years ago he always gave me my money's worth. Great action and good comedy. Arnold, like Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise, was very careful in choosing the scripts he participated in. This is how long-term and big box-office careers are created and maintained. However, in the last few years Arnold has gone astray. His last good action film was True Lies and comedy Jingle all the Way. Eraser was yawning and Batman and Robin just plain sucked.
This movie would have been better off as a Jean Claude Van Damme flick. Although Byrne 'does good evil' as the devil and as a tempter, his New Yorker accent was annoying and the scene were they have him pissing gasoline was third-rate stupidity. Tunney's performance as the skirt in distress although cute, was forgettable. But most of all the script was mediocre and the reasoning for why the devil had to mate by the end of the year was moronic nonsense. The action scenes were especially poorly done. They were warmed-over hash of better done films and there were too many closeup shots during the action sequences. I hate that. That's what they used to do a lot of back in the 70s.
Overall, my advice would be to wait until the video is out of the new release category.
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