It’s hard to get mad at any movie that features Arnold Schwarzenegger getting the ever-loving sh*t kicked out of him by Miriam Margoyles, but one standout – and unintentionally hilarious – scene isn’t enough to earn End of Days a rose-tinted reappraisal.
It was a decent-sized hit at the box office after earning a robust $212 million on a budget of $100 million, but a trio of Razzie nominations for Worst Actor, Worst Director, and Worst Supporting Actor were fully deserved. Perhaps the biggest mistake the film made was that it took itself far too seriously, because the premise is so insane that a little levity would have gone a long way in amongst the straight-faced idiocy emerging at every turn.
End of Days made history as not just the first Schwarzenegger vehicle where he died at the end, but it also marks one of the very rare occasions that he cried onscreen, but the fact it happens in a relentlessly drab tale of demonic possession, satanic cabals, and the looming threat of the hilariously unfounded Y2K panic only serves to deliver a high concept cocktail of disappointment.
That being said, you can just about wring some ironic enjoyment out of the action-packed hybrid of biblical blockbuster and supernatural horror if you’re in exactly the right mindset, which must be fugue OSN subscribers find themselves in en masse this week after End of Days struck a bargain with the devil himself to cement itself as one of the streaming service’s most-watched features, per FlixPatrol.
