James Proclaims!

End of Days is a perplexingly bad movie that fails to work on almost every level. Even as a mindless action vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger it doesn’t really work. My recollection of action movies from the eighties and nineties was that if Arnie was playing the lead, it was predominantly so he could beat up the bad guys in increasingly violent ways. But in this he mainly seems to be the person getting beaten up. Which presumably means he was cast in this to act. I’d be the last person to ever criticise Schwarzenegger’s acting, I always felt that he knew his limitations and took on parts that played to his strengths. But it would have taken an actor of peerless genius to make the material on offer in End of Days seem anything less than abysmal. Alas Arnie quite possibly makes the whole mess even worse. Although that may actually be giving him too much credit.

Still, if you set your expectations low enough and consume a few glasses of your favourite tipple beforehand, you may well find that End of Days falls happily into the category of ‘so bad it’s good’. That’s certainly how I consumed it.

Score for Christmasishness

As the plot, insofar as there was a plot, seemed to be about the attempted conception of the antichrist, then you might almost call this an anti-Christmas movie. But that would be giving the narrative far too much credit and I judge the Christmasishness of a film on far more simplistic terms. This film is set during the week between Christmas and New Year (specifically Christmas 1999, which apparently has some spurious bearing on the plot) which means there are a lot of Christmas trees etc. on screen for most of the running time. So, in spite of the subject matter, it does all look quite Christmas(ish).