End of Days - Y2K and Satan

No real reason to write about End of Days. I guess it’s because I watched the Netflix documentary on Arnold the other day, and this is also on Netflix. I also wanted to see if I thought this sucked as much as I did when I saw it in the theater. So here are my thoughts on End of Days, a true time capsule of a movie.

You Don’t Have to Like Everything

Growing up loving movies, I used to lie to myself and think that everything I saw in the theater was good. It was just too disappointing to my young brain to imagine that I made a special trip to the theater to see a shitty movie. Two movies finally broke me of this: Mission: Impossible 2 and End of Days. End of Days came out first, so I think it laid the groundwork for me to be disappointed with M:I 2. 

End of Days came out when I was fifteen, and I was slowly becoming more critical about movies. Before this, I just loved everything that I chose to watch. For example, I even thought I liked Arnold’s previous movie, Batman and Robin. I was too blind to see just how bad things had become for one of my favorite action stars. Aside from “liking” Batman and Robin, I simply skipped the movies I subconsciously knew I wouldn’t like, such as Junior, Eraser, and Jingle All the Way. As far as I was concerned, Arnold went from True Lies to Mr. Freeze. 

By the time End of Days came out, though, I knew something was wrong. A couple years had passed since Batman and Robin came out, and I started to understand that that movie actually sucked. So I knew End of Days was a comeback of sorts for Arnold. I found out years later that it was a legitimate comeback as it was his first movie after having heart surgery. Either way, this R-rated movie about Satan and the end of the world looked cool as shit compared to the childish shit Arnold had been making throughout the late ‘90s.

It finally comes out, and it’s okay. Arnold seems fine, but this isn’t his type of movie. I knew something was wrong when I liked Gabriel Byrne more than Arnold in it (to be fair, Byrne’s role is much more fun than Arnold’s). The dark aesthetic and apocalyptic story was just too late at that point. The movie was clearly ripping off Se7en and The Devil’s Advocate. End of Days had the look and mood of those films, but none of the energy or freshness. 

End of Days didn’t end Arnold’s career or anything (politics did that soon after), but it marked the end of an era for me. I finally admitted that my favorite actors could make some mediocre shit. This seems obvious now, but for a teenager who loved movies more than anything it was a real fucking bummer. Because of that, I initially reacted very negatively to this movie. Now that the original disappointment had worn off, I wondered if this movie was really all that bad.

Yeah, it is bad. I don’t hate it, but this isn’t something I plan on ever watching again. It’s too dark, literally and figuratively, and I want some fun with my Arnold movies. There’s no fun to be had here, even with Kevin Pollak being a smartass throughout. I appreciate the grimy production value of the movie, but overall it just takes itself way too seriously and makes very little sense when you try to understand the entire plot.

But the passage of time has improved my opinion of End of Days in one way: nostalgia. But not for Arnold; for Y2K.

Y2K

The Y2K scare was a real fear for me at the time. I wasn’t concerned with the computer glitch issue as much as I was afraid the world was going to end. It seems stupid now, but back then I worried about the world ending way more than I should have. It didn’t help that movies like this existed to remind me about it.

Now Y2K is a joke, and rightfully so. And that makes this movie unintentionally funny at times. A big point of the plot is the fact that the millennium is ending. And according to the Bible (in this movie, at least) that means Satan is going to walk the Earth, try to bang a lady, and then the world will end. 

My Y2K fear didn’t involve Satan fucking anyone. I just thought earthquakes and whatnot would end all life. Still, it’s funny to see the general Y2K fear front and center in a movie. Movies date themselves all the time with technology and style and whatnot, but it’s a bit rare for a non-period piece movie to be so concerned with the year it takes place. Not only is the central plot of the movie about the millennium ending, but it’s also in the background throughout the movie, on posters and being discussed on the radio. 

Another movie from this time period involved Y2K: Office Space. But in that movie, it was just part of the main character’s job, and it was so boring that he stopped himself from explaining it to another character because it didn’t matter. And that’s how Y2K really played out. Some programmers had to work on some software, and then nothing happened. Because of that, Office Space doesn’t really take me back to that time period. But End of Days does. 

The focus on Y2K was the most enjoyable aspect of my rewatch. End of Days may have been a disappointment at the time, and it marked the end of an era in my movie watching. But now it reminds me of a specific fear that gripped me for a short time in a way that no other movie can. And it’s also a reminder of how fucking it stupid it was to have been afraid of a year. So End of Days will always have that, and that’s about it.

Random Thoughts / Favorite Quotes

I imagine the pitch for this movie went something like this: “It's like Se7en meets Devil's Advocate meets Rosemary's Baby, but it's the apocalypse, and with Arnold and Kevin Pollak instead of Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman.”

This came out during the era in which all horror and horror-adjacent movies had to have an edgy soundtrack. Korn, Rob Zombie, Eminem, Creed, Guns N’ Roses, Powerman 5000, and Limp Bizkit are all on this soundtrack. Even though a few of the songs are credited at the end, I can’t recall hearing anything from the soundtrack during the actual film. Although, the Guns N’ Roses song does play during the credits. 

I feel a little ashamed, but I actually like the Guns N’ Roses song from this.

What horrible parents allowed their baby to have fake snake blood fed to it by Udo Kier?

Also, how did that nurse know that was the right baby? I really don’t understand how the Satanist group operates in this movie.

And was Udo Kier just camping out down there with snakes? And for how long?

I swear the stupid blender concoction Arnold makes at the beginning is nearly the same shit Brian Bosworth feeds his iguana in Stone Cold.

I like how dirty New York is in this movie. Grimy, shitty New York is my favorite.

Gabriel Byrne is crazy horny in this.

Forgot about the scene with Satan's explosive piss. Wild.

“Why don't you just stop with all this church talk and tell us what the hell is going on?”

Cool to see Hector Salamanca as the Pope.

Udo Kier’s death was so sudden and funny. That dude devoted his life to Satan, and Satan finally shows up, fucks and body morphs his wife and daughter (but that was in another character’s dream or something; still not sure what the fuck was happening there), then punches a hole in his head just for delivering some slightly bad news. 

Sven-Ole Thorsen is one of the dudes who kills Arnold's family. 

Arnold, after shooting Kevin Pollak: "Stop being such a pussy!"

A lot of the Darth Schwarzenegger YouTube video lines came from this.

I know he says some bullshit about making him feel real pain or something, but it makes no sense for Satan to keep Arnold alive.

Stan Winston made a practical giant Satan suit for the end, but they replaced it in post with a full CG version. What a waste. The CG isn't awful (for the time), but why not just use the awesome suit you already filmed?

Um…if Arnold just waited five seconds, wouldn't things have still worked out? Did he have to kill himself? I'm cool with the ending; I'm just not sure it had to go down that way. I do remember thinking it was kind of cool that he actually died at the end, which is rare in a non-Terminator role for Arnold.

Transformers - Ranked

For the last few years, I thought I hated the Transformers series. Maybe “hate” is too strong a word, but I was definitely indifferent to it, having skipped the two Wahlberg movies and only watching Bumblebee because it received surprisingly good reviews. Then my four-year-old son started playing with the toys, and Rise of the Beasts came out. Having kids has put a massive dent in my theater-going, and I’ve been looking forward to the day that I could take my kids to movies I actually want to see. He and my daughter are a little young for it, but I decided to take a chance and take them to see it.

The focus on the human characters bored them at times, but they made it through the whole movie without incident. And I was pleasantly surprised by the movie, though part of me missed the Michael Bay insanity (or Baysanity, as I will refer to it for the rest of this list). So I decided to rewatch the entire series and give my personal rankings.

Before I get to that, I want to explain my overall feelings about the series and my rationale for the ranking. Rewatching the Bay movies that I once considered garbage (aside from the first one, which I’ve always liked), I realized that I liked all of these movies. I don’t like them in a traditional sense. Instead, I enjoyed watching them become increasingly unhinged until we ended up with the literally difficult to watch The Last Knight. I learned quickly to not worry too much about the plot. I just knew that the world would be at stake, and in almost every movie Optimus Prime would learn that humanity was worth fighting for, even though he somehow forgot that he learned that between each film. 

Burning through the series, I came to enjoy the insane first half of the Bay movies, which mainly consisted of wacky and juvenile humor and cartoonish acting (hey John Malkovich and John Turturro). And then the second half was there for mindless action, in which I could sometimes tell what was going on, especially if it was in slow motion. The point is, I didn’t get too precious with these. This is a series based on toys; how seriously are we supposed to take it? Finally, I also considered rewatchability. I discovered I could put on almost any of the Bay movies at any time and shut off my brain and enjoy myself. This is why some of his stuff will rank above the almost traditionally good Bumblebee. Okay, enough explaining, here’s the list.

1. Transformers

I was kind of surprised by how wacky this one was upon a rewatch. I remembered a much more traditional Michael Bay summer movie, but this is very much Baysanity, just much less than all the sequels he directed. Still, this is the one that reminds me most of a traditional summer action movie like I grew up with, a la Independence Day, Armageddon (which is name-dropped in this movie), etc. I love all the crazy shit that happened in the later movies, but on a rewatchability scale, this is the one I want to revisit. But you still have plenty of wacky/inappropriate stuff to marvel at. For instance, a dog pisses on an Autobot, an Autobot pisses on a government agent, Megan Fox, playing a high schooler, is shot as if she’s in a soft-core porno and adult characters call her hot, LeBeouf and Fox end the film making out on top of Bumblebee while other Autobots watch, the douchey guy named Trent was such a good douche that he later played a douche played Trent in the Bay-produced Friday the 13th remake, the product placement comes to life, etc. I remember being surprised by how much I liked this the first time I saw it, and now I appreciate it for being crazy but restrained enough to pass for a regular movie. It will always be my go-to when I want to revisit this world.

2. Transformers: Dark of the Moon

This one surprised me the most upon a rewatch. I remember being amped up for this when the previews first came out. It looked like a return to form after the disappointing second film, and it was in 3D (which was something that excited me at the time). And then it ended up being a goofy mess. These days, though, I enjoy a goofy mess from time to time. And the action half of the movie is pretty damn good. Some of that shit in the city is awesome (sliding down a toppling skyscraper, jumping out of a crashing helicopter, etc.). It turns out this is just as crazy as I want Bay to go before it gets tiresome. Oh, and John Malkovich put this over the top to place second; I don’t know what the fuck he’s doing in this, but I like it.

3. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

I like the Baysanity, but I also enjoy fairly straightforward simple movies in this series, too. And let’s face it: five Bay versions of this franchise is plenty. It’s time to move into a slightly more sane world. At least it is, for me. Maybe it’s recency bias, but this film struck the perfect balance of stupid shit and decent action. 

4. Bumblebee

This movie was so traditionally decent that they left Transformers off the title in an attempt to distance itself from the franchise. And that’s why it’s not higher on my list. It’s good, and you actually care about the main character this time around, but that’s not really what I’m looking for in this series. Still, it’s a good time, and god damn is it refreshing to only have to keep track of a handful of robots. 

5. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

This isn’t as bad as I remember, but it’s still among the three films I don’t plan on ever watching again. This is when the action first became indecipherable at times, but the human characters actually elevate it a bit for me. I love the part with Sam’s mom acting like she’s on bath salts after eating a pot brownie. And I guarantee the only reason why John Turturro was allowed to climb on an actual pyramid was because Bay had to promise him something to get Turturro to agree to do some wacky shit like show his ass and talk about robot testicles. Oh, and I guess Transformers can be humans, and there’s a robot afterlife or something. It doesn’t matter. None of this matters. 

6. Transformers: Age of Extinction

This is when the Baysanity truly took over, and I’m fine with it. Fuck it, put Marky Mark in there as an inventor. Have Stanley Tucci turn full lunatic near the end. Throw in some dinobots. Who cares? If not for the ridiculous running time of 165 minutes, this would be at least one spot higher on my list. These movies (aside from the last two movies) are all way too long, but pushing three hours is crossing a fucking line.

7. Transformers: The Last Knight

I sincerely believe Michael Bay went into a fugue state while he made this nearly unwatchable fuckery. Honestly, it’s only hard to watch because the aspect ratio inexplicably changes throughout the film, even during dialogue scenes. It’s just too distracting for me. If not for that, I might have loved this one, because all of this nonsense happens in it: Stanley Tucci plays a drunk Merlin, Mark Wahlberg becomes a Knight of the Round Table, Wahlberg calls an Autobot voiced by Steve Buscemi a “skank,” Anthony Hopkins calls Wahlberg “dude” and talks to him about “whoopie,” a robot butler sings a Ludacris song, there are submarines, Turturro gets to literally phone in his performance (which is even lazier than getting to sit in a wheelchair the whole time, like he did in his last appearance), the Autobots fight Nazis, and Stonehenge, for some reason. But Bay just couldn’t help himself and had to fuck it up with all those different ratios. Oh, well. 

Legionnaire - The Beginning of the End

As usual, I lost all motivation for writing about movies this year. I still watch plenty of shit, but writing about it (beyond Letterboxd entries) just didn’t interest me. And now I’m going to make myself get back into it. Part of the problem is that I’m on this stupid completionist kick in which I watch every movie in a series or a director’s filmography. I don’t want to devote the time to write about every single film, so I tell myself that I’ll just do a ranking, which is why two of my last few posts are rankings of Cronenberg and the Leprechaun movies. Because of this, I currently have multiple rankings articles I’m in the middle of, such as the Craig Bond movies, the Transformers series, the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, the Alien franchise, and the Final Destination movies. Will I finish all, or any, of these? I hope so. In the meantime, I needed to fucking write something, and when that’s the case, I turn to Jean-Claude Van Damme.

The Beginning of the End 

Legionnaire always reminds me of a moment from Jackie Chan’s monologue when he hosted SNL in 2000 (you can watch it here, unfortunately it isn’t on YouTube or I would just embed the video). Chan is confronted by fading action stars as his career is in the middle of its Rush Hour heights. Will Ferrell shows up as Steven Seagal, and Chris fucking Kattan shows up as Van Damme. As Chan brags about being in Rush Hour, Kattan counters with, “Well, I did a little movie too last year. Maybe you heard of it. It’s called Legionnaire!” The audience laughs, and a defeated Kattan walks offstage. 

Having Chris Kattan portray JCVD is bad enough, but that Legionnaire joke is doubly hurtful. Not only was it a movie no one paid attention to, but it was also the first time, since becoming a star, a Van Damme movie went straight to video. His previous two theatrical films were Knock Off and Double Team, so you can imagine why this happened. His next film after Legionnaire, Universal Soldier: The Return, got a theatrical release, but that last ditch effort bombed as well, and aside from voicework and his villain turn in The Expendables 2 (in which he was named…Vilain), JCVD has been stuck in the direct to video world.

In that way, Legionnaire marks the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. In the old days, you could count on those theatrical JCVD movies to at least be wacky enough to be fun, but the direct to video era led to JCVD’s only truly boring movies. These are the movies with the awful interchangeable titles like Derailed, In Hell, The Order, Wake of Death, Second in Command, Until Death, Enemies Closer, etc. I’ve seen them all, but I can rarely remember a thing about any of them. But I can easily remember what each theatrical release is about. 

With the direct to video era, I would watch each new Van Damme movie hoping for the rare diamond in the rough (like Replicant or Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning). But most of the films are forgettable. And somewhere in the middle, you end up with the surprisingly decent movie, like Legionnaire. But is surprisingly decent a good thing?

I Prefer Shitshows

If you look up anything on Legionnaire, you’ll likely come across user reviews along these lines: “Better than you’d expect,” “Give this a chance,” “Surprisingly good,” etc. And it’s true, Legionnaire is better than you’d expect; but you’re expecting straight up dogshit, so how big of a compliment is it?

Legionnaire is a throwback film a la The Quest in which Van Damme attempts to make a romantic historical epic. Van Damme plays a boxer in 1920s France who refuses to take a dive for a mobster. He then has to join the French Foreign Legion to escape. While in the Legion, Van Damme becomes friends with three other legionnaires, and the film focuses on the bond that forms among soldiers. Van Damme doesn’t really learn anything, and it doesn’t seem like he really needed to join the Legion to get away from the mobster (especially when his girlfriend was left behind), but this is the movie. 

Ignoring those issues, this is a surprisingly effective story about these four characters that is light on the action you come to expect from a Van Damme film. Sure, there are battle scenes, but Van Damme doesn’t do the splits or even kick anyone. That’s how you know he’s serious. 

I’m not against Van Damme trying to prove he can act (I loved his performance in JCVD), but there is a time and place for it, and the late 1990s were not it. His movies were failing at the time, but his physicality wasn’t. He could still do roundhouse kicks, and there’s a time limit on that ability (there is not, however, a time limit on doing the splits; Van Damme will be buried doing the fucking splits). This was a movie Van Damme should have made in his 50s, not his 30s.

Despite that, the film works. As a Van Damme fan, though, I don’t particularly care if the film works. I want a shitshow like Double Team more than I want a serviceable historical drama. I’ll remember the goofy shit from Double Team for years; I’ll forget every minute of Legionnaire by next week.

That’s what annoys me the most about JCVD’s direct to video era: there aren’t enough crazy movies. And I don’t understand it. I get why some of the theatrical stuff had to play it safe from time to time, but what do you have to lose when you’re making a movie called Wake of Death? I like to think that I am a typical Van Damme fan, and fans like the goofier moments of his best films, like the drunk dancing in Kickboxer, or the “Mwah!” of Bloodsport. 

And if we can’t get the classic goofy stuff, then at least make a movie in which Van Damme plays twins, or has a rickshaw chase scene with Rob Schneider, or faces of against Mickey Rourke and a tiger, or plays an all-American Street Fighter character without even attempting to lose the accent. Give me any of that shit, as long as it’s fun and memorable. 

Thankfully, Van Damme has embraced more comedic stuff in later years, with the Jean-Claude Van Johnson series and The Last Mercenary. Neither of those were great, but they’re a lot better than the forgettable shit. And I’ll gladly take a comedic misfire over Legionnaire, a movie so forgettable that it makes me think of Chris Kattan playing Van Damme on SNL more than it makes me think of the movie itself. 

Van Damme Character Name Check

Alain Lefevre. The movie begins in France, so Van Damme was guaranteed to have a fitting name for this one.

Random Thoughts

This is still technically an action movie, but the boxing scene was regular boxing, not kickboxing. And the rest of the shit was military action, and I want to see Van Damme kicking people, not shooting them.

The drill sergeant is fucking awful. He growls every line like a maniac. It just doesn’t fit with the somber tone of the film. He can’t say normal lines (like “Unpack the ammo”) without snarling them. Every time he talks, it ruins the scene.

Kudos to this film for acknowledging that the Foreign Legion are intruders in a foreign land. A lesser film would attempt to romanticize their mission. Instead, this is much more about the friendship developed by four legionnaires rather than the military goal.

Guido is one of the most destined to die characters I’ve seen recently. He has a girlfriend back home. He’s hopelessly innocent (he spends time with a prostitute talking about his girlfriend). He’s clearly the weakest soldier in the group. It just seemed like he could die in any scene. So when the first big battle started, you knew he was a goner.

Could they not film an ending that shows him finding Katrina? I think I would rather have seen him die with his friends instead of this ambiguous ending. He’s alive, but there’s no guarantee he will make it to another fort. And once there, it’s not like the Legion is just going to let him leave. I don’t know. I just thought this film deserved a more definitive ending than the one we got. There are a few earlier draft endings, according to IMDb trivia, but I don’t know how legit they are. Either way, they weren’t filmed, and this ending is all we have. Oh well.

..