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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 9.88%
Worth A Look: 24.69%
Average: 18.52%
Pretty Bad: 16.67%
Total Crap: 30.25%
10 reviews, 102 user ratings
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| End of Days |
by Scott Weinberg
"Take your enemies, then leave."
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"End of Days" is, first and foremost, a movie that sucks; director Peter Hyams lays aside all else and concentrates on making every single frame shockingly lame and familiar. He creates a world shrouded in a pre-Millenial silliness and then sits back while his stars blow each other and buildings up. If this doesn't sound like something you've already seen, wait until you witness the retarded CGI orgies, the Xeroxed explosions, and the unintentionally hilarious crucifixion scene.Loads of audiences will be bored to tears by this movie for one reason or another; if it's not the "done for the millionth time" action plot, and it's not for the really lazy and "where's my check" directing, it'll be for some of the worst acting ever placed on celluloid. None of these things really matter, because the whole package is just worthless.
I went in looking for explosions, blood, nudity and hopefully a scene of a bloody and nude girl who explodes. I got all three in small, bite-sized nuggets, with a lot of smoke (which is what directors now employ when trying to achieve 'style') and lots of poor editing that gave me a mild seizure. Director Hyams slaps superfluous and pointless amounts of firepower on the screen without logic or even a nod to the plot-- again, just a series of somewhat related scenes with an occassional gun going off or head exploding. The copious amounts of silly violence showcased here are still not nearly enough to entertain any audience that has been brought up on Jerry Bruckheimer.
Basically, this is an idiot's film--bloody and boring, even the moments of supposed beauty are intermittently interrupted by the sound of something going BOOM. Try not to fall asleep while Hyams turns a church into a TNT and CGI funhouse of silliness, as pews throw themselves skyward in exactly the 'back-to-front' technique that never earns an Oscar nomination for best exploding church. Before this scene comes Arnold's stone-faced attempt to keep the audience from giggling while he delivers some somber and serious dialogue. While this scene is as transparent as all the others, you can feel it in your stomach--cinema as weak, commercialized product.
If you sit back, look past the horrible one-liners and biblically wooden performances, and pay attention to how monotonous, familiar and canned the action sequences are, you just might stay awake. Making such a sucky movie is not the world's most groundbreaking trick (it is Hollywood, after all), but End of Days is something to be noticed- A movie that sucks even more than it should have. At least Bruckheimer knows how to have a good time.Snap to attention--if you generally moan about generic action movies, just adding some moronic bible babble into the script just ain't gonna cut it. Miss it.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=798&reviewer=128
originally posted: 12/01/99 12:21:20
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USA
24-Nov-1999 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
26-Dec-1999
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