End of Days (1999)

Satan comes to New York to impregnate a woman at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve. Arnold Schwarzenegger, playing a grizzled, alcoholic ex-cop turned bodyguard, must stop him. Armed with holy water, a shotgun, and what I can only describe as sheer Austrian willpower. That is the film. That is genuinely the film. And somehow, everyone involved appears to have made it with a completely straight face.

End of Days is absolutely awful. I want to get that out of the way early, because everything else I say about it comes with that caveat firmly attached. The dialogue is cringe-worthy, the religious themes are about as subtle as a sledgehammer wrapped in a crucifix, and the action, while loud, is almost entirely uninspired. The score leans so hard into melodramatic operatics that it tips over into self-parody. And yet, and here is where it gets complicated, I cannot pretend I didn't occasionally enjoy myself, for entirely the wrong reasons.

I remember watching this on VHS with friends back in the day and thinking it was genuinely cool. Post-Terminator gravitas, gothic horror atmosphere, Gabriel Byrne oozing menace as the Devil himself. Teenage me was sold. There was something about the combination of Arnie's deadpan badassery and the apocalyptic stakes that felt weirdly thrilling. I had a soft spot for this one, and I went into this revisit hoping some of that spark had survived.

It had not. Revisiting End of Days as an adult is a bruising experience, not because it is offensive or mean-spirited, but because it is so earnestly, committedly daft. The plot mechanics make very little sense if you stop and breathe for a moment. The spiritual stakes are handled with all the theological sophistication of a religious pamphlet you'd find on a bus seat. And the film keeps reaching for profundity, keeps trying to say something meaningful about faith and redemption, and keeps falling flat on its face every single time.

Gabriel Byrne is doing his level best, to be fair. He brings a genuine, unsettling charisma to the Devil, and there are fleeting moments where you can see the more interesting, creepier film lurking underneath the bombast. But it gets buried. Every time things threaten to build genuine tension, something explodes, or Arnie delivers a line with that magnificent deadpan, and any atmosphere that was gathering just evaporates.

It is worth saying that Arnie has made genuinely great films. I think Predator is a near-perfect action film, and my feelings about Terminator 2: Judgment Day are probably well documented. End of Days sits at the far, far other end of that spectrum. This is Arnie at his most tonally confused, caught between playing it straight and leaning into the absurdity, and never quite managing either. The result is something that feels weirdly similar in spirit to Batman & Robin (1997), another late-90s blockbuster that collapses under the weight of its own excess while remaining oddly watchable in a rubbernecking sort of way.

And that is the honest summary of the thing. It is not good by any sensible measure. The plot is ridiculous, the tone is all over the place, and it tries so desperately to be The Omen that you almost feel sorry for it. But if you are an Arnie completist, or if you grew up with this one and want a nostalgic wince, there is a certain guilty pleasure to be had here. Just go in knowing exactly what you are getting: 90s excess cranked to eleven, drenched in religious cheese, and completely baffling in the best and worst ways simultaneously.

One and a half stars.

Rating: ★½  | Year: 1999  | Watched: 2025-10-28

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More from Peter Hyams: Timecop (1994)
More with Arnold Schwarzenegger: Batman & Robin (1997) · Last Action Hero (1993) · Predator (1987) · Terminator Genisys (2015)
More from the 1990s: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · Blue (1993) · Cemetery Man (1994)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)