End of Days (1999) Review

As we are closing in on the end of the century, Satan makes a visit to New York in search of a bride to have a child with between 11pm and midnight on New Year’s Eve this will cause the world to end. His search for Christine York is going to be more difficult with Jericho an ex-cop who now runs an elite security service and does not believe in god.

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Satan or the Devil or The Man as he is also known throughout as to begin with it is unclear the motives. Considering the devil has just picked a body and taken it to try and complete his world ending scheme. Attempting to find Christine to ensure she is pregnant before midnight on New Years Eve in 1999 as the world enters into the year 2000. I guess this actually fit in rather well with the fact that the Y2K crash and many other issues were expected so having this film come out with this plot just before that was a rather good idea.

Obviously a film released in 1999 with an 18 rating was not something I would have heard about at the time being only 11 years old when it was released, I guess some of it does not really hold up in the same manner as the panic of what would happen as we went into the year 2000. I guess throwing in the devil, God and religion was another way to make people concerned. End of Days seems to have slipped past my radar when it comes to catching up with Schwarzenegger films. Although I want to get it in quite early on that I actually struggled with this film for a couple of reasons.

The first reason was that anything that has this type of religious tone makes me a little bit nervous in all honesty, I find it a little bit creepy as its something that I don’t think I fully understand or even get in terms of how I actually feel about the whole heaven and hell concept. Within this film it is done in a very creepy way and it made me rather uneasy, so much so I actually thought about turning it off.

It does boast a rather impressive cast that was lead by Arnold Schwarzenegger who is one of my ultimate actor guilty pleasures as you quite frankly always know exactly what you are going to get when you watch one of his films. I actually loved the fact that Gabriel Byrne was the devil as lets face it he is a fantastic actor, but other than his performance I felt as though everything else was just below par. Which was such a shame when support came from Kevin Pollak, Miriam Margolyes, Rainer Judd and then Robin Tunney in more of a leading role.

I guess I just took this film as being an interesting concept but just not executed in a very good way, falling way short of what the talented cast should have been capable of pulling off which I guess is just a shame really.