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End of Days
So Bad It's Kind of Precious
1999
Director: Peter Hyams
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robin Tunney, Gabriel Byrne
Quite certainly!
THE SETUP:
The devil comes to Earth to end it all for good… but he didn’t count on Schwarzenegger!
DISCUSSION:
I saw this movie expecting it to be pretty bad, but truly I was unprepared for just how moronic, how cliched, how silly it really was. Nevertheless, they don't make bad movies like they used to, they seem to be able to make most movies, no matter how bad, somewhat redeeming, so it's a real pleasure to see an out-and-out BAD movie that is so very horrid that it just becomes precious, like a sixth-grade play or something. It becomes a little cute because the creators really don't seem to know how terrible it is. And that's sweet.
Here are just some general impressions:
This kind of action movie is so dated now. Since The Matrix changed the rules for action movies, this kind of over-the-top bombast and hulking hero with "snappy" one-liners really seems SO early 80's. There were times when I thought this movie might get a little creepy, but every time it starts to accumulate some atmosphere it is shattered by a huge explosion or one of Arnold's stunts or something else that returns the film to it's VERY general-audience level of banality. This is VERY MUCH an Arnold film. It also feels very dated like one.
In this film Arnold was trying to act, and seeing it, you will applaud his decision to give up on acting [though maybe not to go into politics]. One thing he can never get past is: HE'S ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER. He can't assume roles like other actors can, unless that role is of an Austrian Bodybuilder. It's funny in this movie because at one point he's supposed to have fallen into squalor, living on pizza and beer and Chinese takeout--and yet he has this incredible body! Also, his version of "acting" in this movie is to raise his eyebrows in a "Crazy...or is he?" kind of grimace, which won't quite work through a whole movie. It was quite precious to watch, though.
This film was SO OBVIOUSLY filmed in Toronto or somewhere else. Now that I live in NYC you can just look at a corner, and even if you don't know where it is, you know it just doesn't have that New York look. Here they show a cut of Times Square or the Chrysler Building and then cut to Toronto. It's funny. They also throw these VERY cheap-looking "NY2K" posters EVERYWHERE (so much that I thought at one point they might have something to do with the story)... but the posters are too cheap-looking to be real. Nothing that cheap-looking would ever be put up in NYC. The second part to this is the INCREDIBLY fake-looking subway. My favorite is the little signs that say "Penn Station" and "Times Square"... as if from that we must really know we're in New York! They're just picking places tourists would recognize and say "Oh yeah, New York!" Why not say "Statue of Liberty" or "Empire State Building?" The subway cars were also extra dirty, to conform to stereotypes of what NYC is like. It's not like that anymore: the subway is very clean and safe now, but we do have to keep up stereotypes of what the city is like, don't we? Also, there's no enormous church just off Times Square, but I'm splitting hairs. The effect is very comical.
The dialogue is just SO SO bad, so bad that I can't even remember some of the worst lines. I'm not talking about the one-liners... you expect to howl at those, I mean just the all-the-way-through dialogue. Wow. Bad.
Anyway, all round quite ridiculous, but good fun if you expect it to be bad from the start, My hand was over my mouth in a mixture of horror/laughs through almost the whole movie. This is definitely one for the ages.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
Yes, but only in the presence of a bottle of Vodka.
