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End of Days

There’s a sense of unoriginality throughout this Arnold Schwarzennegger movie. The beginning with Ahnold holding a gun to his head feels just like Mel Gibson doing similar in Lethal Weapon. The mainly faceless gang doing the devil’s work feels just like the zombies in The Mummy helping it. Ahnold finding the secret, underground society of satan worshippers is just like Indiana Jones finding similar in The Temple Of Doom.

• Logic

-Let’s see, the devil can resurrect the dead, repair bullet wounds to its chosen body, clean up the scratches from falling fifteen stories onto a car, but cannot do anything when hit by a subway train. OK, got it, just wanted to know the boundaries.

-Once the devil takes over Gabriel Byrne’s body, it fondles and kisses the wife of the man with whom he was having dinner. Later, he makes love to the doctor’s wife and daughter. Oooooh. Is that what the devil is about? His own pleasure?

-In the first church scene with the devil, Ahnold and the girl, the all-powerful satan cannot detect the girl escaping up the side just twenty feet away from him.

-Ahnold has many clues pointing to religious and supernatural forces behind the priest’s death. When he meets the girl, he says he has also had visions. But when he takes the girl to the church looking for answers- feeling they are the only ones with answers- he scoffs at their theory that the devil is on the loose. I would accept skepticism, but not mockery.

-After Ahnold throws the devil out the window, his buddy whom he thought burnt to death knocks on the door. When they make a plan to get the girl, his buddy asks, “So where should we meet?” The look on Ahnold’s face clearly shows that he knows the devil is behind such a question. Yet when Ahnold gets the girl and the gang surrounds them, Ahnold tells the girl to get into his buddy’s car which had just burst onto scene.

-In the finale church scene, Ahnold is standing in the middle of the aisle while debris rains down from the roof and skylight. When the rain stops, Ahnold is surrounded by chunks of plaster- they all miraculously missed him by inches.

-And what’s with that massive creature after the above? The devil is established as a spirit in the beginning of the movie that needs a body to impregnate the girl. So where did the monster come from? Did the spirit-devil find a real monster and take its body? And why/how did it come from under the ground?

• Editing

What a disaster. Most of the action sequences, and a few non-action scenes- have way too many cuts. The quick changes from far to close to reverse makes the action fake and annoying. That exciting sequence with Ahnold strapped to a helicopter could be breath-taking with less cuts.

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