Schwarzenegger has faced a variety of villains during his tenure as a Hollywood legend – he’s brawled with alien hunters, fought entire armies single handed and even went toe to toe with a roomful of corrupt Santas at one point. However, the search to find a bad guy worthy of the biceps of the Austrian Oak would inevitably end up in the only logical place it could – pitting Arnie against Satan himself. That’s right, with anxiety concerning the millennium building steadily, the powers that be obviously figured that the Y2K Bug was for wimps and the real threat that faced us on December 31st, 1999, was the devil himself cruising the streets of New York in order to get laid.
However, while we looked to Schwarzenegger for salvation, there was something else that needed saving – his action career which had been in a noticable decline since the heyday of True Lies. Could Arnie vanquish the Prince of lies while resurrecting himself as the king of the action mountain, or would End Of Days be cast into the seventh circle of Hell – metaphorically speaking of course.
Jericho Cane has all but checked out on life. Despite running an elite security agency based in New York, the murder of his wife and child has left him a faithless, suicidal, alcoholic who starts his day blending coffee, pepto bismol, beer, last night’s Chinese food and some leftover pizza on the floor into some sort of ungodly smoothie before trying to drag himself through the next 24 hours. However, after he and his wisecracking buddy save an investment banker from assassination from a tongueless, prophetic, Vatican priest who seems to be on some sort of mission from God.
However, while everyone has written off this guy as a whacko, it turns out that there may be something in his fears after all. You see, that banker that Cane saved has been chosen to be a vessel for Satan himself and he’s arrived on earth to fulfil a prophecy that will see his spawn born though a young woman who has been unknowingly groomed from birth to receive his unholy seed. The woman in question is Christine York, an orphaned girl who is being wracked by terrible visions that seem to be warning her of her fate, but seeing as literally everyone around her is part of this satanic conspiracy (her shrink is Udo Kier for fuck’s sake), it seems as if she’s doomed to be the mother of the anti-christ.
But worse is still yet to come for Christine, because while the satanists are lining her up for a hot date with Satan himself, the Vatican have appointed knights to try and kill her before the devil seals the deal. Enter Jericho, who finds himself swept up in this religious arms race despite the fact he refuses to believe in a God who’d allow his family to bite the big one. However, a faithless man – even one the size of Jericho – is going to have a hard time squaring up to the poster boy of all evil.
Nestled somewhere between Arnold’s early nineties triumphs and his move into the political arena as the Governator of California, End Of Days has ended up being a somewhat forgotten and underrated entry into Schwarzenegger’s impressive action cannon. But while I’d agree that compared to the likes of Total Recall, Terminator 2 and True Lies, Schwarzenegger’s rumble with Satan may seem quite mid, when watched with fresher eyes you start to find that the film does quite a few new things with the typical Arnie format. For a start, Arnie’s never really “done” full horror before unless you count his titular, unstoppable cyborg in The Terminator as having techno-roots in the slasher craze of the early 80s. However, here we find him exploring murky houses right out of Se7en, stumbling across supernaturally mutilated bodies right out of Event Horizon and being tempted by the devil with visions of a happier life right out of The Last Temptation Of Christ – OK, maybe I’m stretching a bit with that last one, but my point remains the same: this is as far into horror that Schwarzenegger has ever ventured; and he’s spent screentime with the Crypt Keeper.
Another shift in the Arnie paradigm is that his character – the needlessly elaborately named Jericho Cane – isn’t the usual, immovable object that we’re used to seeing as our hero is tormented by the murder of his wife and daughter who were killed after he gave testimony against crooked cops. Thus we have a more disheveled looking Arnie who is prone to pointing his gun at his own temple during extreme moments of self lothing and somehow still maintains his legendary physique despite living on a diet that would make a drug-addled shut-in balk. While Schwarzenegger doesn’t quite have the acting dexterity to switch between bouts of grief laden misery and his usual action persona without it feeling like two, completely seperate characters, it’s actually quite interesting to see him playing a slightly different character to the untouchable, human tanks he usually portrays, even if he dresses like Richard Kimble from the start of Kindergarten Cop.
In fact, scenes where Jericho verbally faces off with Gabriel Byrne’s smirking devil are actually quite fun, especially the moment when the Austrian Oak starts screaming shit like “You are CHOIR BOY next to me! A CHOIR BOY!!!!” directly into the face of ultimate evil. However, it also helps that director Peter Hyams – still riding his glossy B-movie wave that included Timecop, Sudden Death and The Relic – gives everything that murky, 90s, industrial/goth look that also turned up in films like 9mm and Stigmata. The director may not exactly break the visual mold, but everything looks appropriately grim enough to cover for the fact that the action isn’t exactly that spectacular. Anyone expecting an orgy of Arnie fighting superpowered, possessed satanists may be disappointed that the film cheaps out on any freakish acolytes except for a super strong Miriam Margolyes (no, really), and even the climatic battle with Satan in his human form (who for all his power, is strangely susceptible to an RPG), feels frustratingly brief.
However, even though End Of Days proves tough to gush over, it’s also impossible to hate, especially once you spend some time with Byrne’s down to fuck Prince Of Darkness who relishes every juicy line he’s given. In fact, when he’s not describing the Bible as an overblown press kit or demonstrating that his piss is flammable, the film noticably shoes doen a few steps. On the other hand, when your cast contains CCH Pounder, Rod Steiger, Kevin Pollak and Udo Kier, it’s tough to completely wash out, even though Robin Tunney has not much else to do but scream and run.
While not what I’d call top tier Schwarzenegger, End Of Days still proves to be pretty diverting, even if you feel that it doesn’t use its Arnie vs the Devil plot to its full potential. Still, Gabriel Byrne’s having fun, we get a huge, cancerous bat monster at the end and Saint Christenegger gets to flex those acting muscles a little further than usual. So it’s hardly the end of the world…
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