Movie of the week
Arnold Schwarzenegger has never been better than when he played a cyborg-assassin in The Terminator, and he has never been in a better movie. Subsequent attempts to extend his action career, in films such as The Last Action Hero and True Lies, were comparatively unsuccessful; attempts to develop his persona with roles in comedies such as Twins demonstrated only that he can play the straight man in a comic duo and that he can laugh at himself. And why not? We all do.
In End of Days, he is imbued with some notional character by growing stubble and having a tragic past, and he comes reasonably close to resurrecting himself as a convincing action hero, though he still has to battle against an accent worthy of a Nazi villain in a bad World War II movie and a physique with the grace of a hippo on land.
He also has to battle the devil himself, who has taken advantage of some eschatological hocus pocus (haul out the old manuscripts …) to possess the body of a mortal man and try to impregnate a woman (Robin Tunney) set aside for this purpose since birth; he has to do so just as the millennium draws to a close and the new year’s eve parties go wild. A hairless, blustering Rod Steiger – his name is Father Kovak, which is not a million miles from Kojak – is on hand to explain some of this mumbojumbo, but it makes no more sense than orthodox Catholic theology, so don’t waste any brain-power trying to work it out.
The fun is to be had in the movie’s snappy pace, the exciting action sequences, and in Gabriel Byrne’s elegantly persuasive devil. The Evil One has had the good sense to appropriate the body of an attractively weathered stockbroker, moreover one with a good long black coat, and he certainly has all the best speeches. The one in which he tries to win Arnie over is a masterpiece of satanic brevity: “God, he fucked you, and then he made you feel guilty. Me, I don’t do guilt.”
This is arguably more subversive than Kevin Smith’s forthcoming Dogma, which has attracted the ire of Catholic organisations in the United States. That film plays around amusingly with similar theological issues but papers over the cracks by reinventing God as a nicer, though perhaps even more eccentric, figure than the Jehovah of old. It could also be argued that the scene in which Schwarzenegger, the saviour of the world, is crucified for his pains is more blasphemous than anything in the good-natured Dogma, but that fact seems to have escaped the Vatican. In addition, End of Days has a mad priest called Thomas Aquinas, though we’re not told how he’s related to his sainted 13th-century namesake, revered author of the Summa theologiae.
At any rate, Dogma’s religious questions are possible to take as serious inquries into the nature of faith, which it ultimately reaffirms, while the cynical use of apocalyptic theology in End of Days is not to be given any credence whatsoever. The action is all, and the rest is to be smiled at. Schwarzenegger even has a moment worthy of John Wayne’s in The Greatest Story Ever Told, when that old rightwinger’s sunset-bathed centurion at the foot of the cross looks up and says, “Truly, this man was the Sunnagaahd.”