End of Days (1999) - Arnold faces Satan in Hyams' rigmarole

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The packed, apocalyptic poster for Peter Hyams' End of Days

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A New York ex-cop gets his work cut out from him, as Satan comes to the city in search of a bride.

With End of Days, it's easiest to sum up the film's good parts first: For a fan, Arnold Schwarzenegger (Maggie (2015)) exchanging lines such as these:
[Bad guy]: "I'm not afraid to die!"
[Arnold]: "Good! - 'Cus I'm not afraid to kill you!"
- That's good fun. The film also has Rod Steiger (In the Heat of the Night (1967)) adorning a supporting role, - and some fair action.
But the story is a semi-religious bungle of millennial paranoia and satanism that doesn't really levitate, and some of the elements of the film are simply too kitsch: SPOILER Like Schwarzenegger getting beaten up by an old lady, or Gabriel Byrne (In Treatment (2008-10)) playing Satan, pissing fuel. Also Robin Tunney (Supernova (2000)), the main actress in the film, shows pretty much just one facial expression throughout the film. - And the ending lasts over 40 minutes!
End of Days is written by Andrew W. Marlowe (Hollow Man (2000)) and directed by Peter Hyams (Timecop (1994)).

 

Related post:

 

1999 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess 

Watch a teaser for the film, taken from a VHS tape, here

Cost: Estimated 83 mil. $
Box office: 211.9 mil. $
= Minor hit
[End of Days premiered November 16 and runs 123 minutes. Sam Raimi, Guillermo Del Toro and Marcus Nispel were in talks for the director's seat for the film before it came down to Hyams, who had a good time directing it. Schwarzenegger hadn't been in a film for two years, since Batman & Robin (1997), reportedly due to a health issue, and was ready to mix it up. He received a hefty 25 mil. $ paycheck for it. The film opened #3 to a 20.5 mil. $ first weekend in North America, behind Toy Story 2 (57.3 mil. $) and The World Is Not Enough (23.2 mil. $), and grossed 66.8 mil. $ domestically (31.5 % of the total gross). End of Days is rotten at 11 % with a 3.7 critical average on Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of End of Days?

Cop Out (2010) or, A Couple of Dicks

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Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan are up for some sharp-shooting games in Kevin Smith's Cop Out

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An unlikely NYPD-partnership gets suspended after a scandalous street debacle, but they then get involved in another hairy situation with some Mexican thugs, as a valuable baseball card, which is to finance the older cop's daughter's marriage, gets stolen.

Tracy Morgan (Top Five (2014)) and Bruce Willis (Die Hard (1988)) have chemistry, and I laughed some to start out with. About 40 minutes into the film, (which is written by brothers Robb and Mark Cullen (Back in the Game (2013), TV-series)), a real, and pretty complicated, plot is attempted to be inserted into the preceding buddy cop tomfooleries, but the audience at that point has no interest in the rehash.
Cop Out has several scenes that are just plain stupid or dysfunctional, and the film grows tedious at some point, despite an atypical, cozy 80s-retro electro-hip-hop score, a throwback to the golden age for the relatively young buddy cop sub-genre, by Harold Faltermeyer (Beverly Hills Cop (1984)).
All in all, Cop Out is a pretty uncool film, clearly an uninvolved left-hand-job from director Kevin Smith (Tusk (2014)), who usually makes small, more or less personal indie flicks. - This was his first hired gig, which he didn't write himself, and it was obviously not a project he felt very enthusiastic about: He has stated that a reason for doing it was that it is the kind of movie his late father would have liked. During shooting, Smith was accused of being uninvolved and far away due to his marijuana-smoking while working. He, on the other hand, badmouthed Willis in a radio program after the production ... Smith was soon back with a much more relevant and dignified film, the great Red State (2011), which I recommend.

 Watch the trailer for the film, which puts it next to some modern classics and then reveals the low quality of Cop Out - ... as a way to get you to see it ... ?

Cost: 37 mil. $
Box office: 55.5 mil. $
= Flop
[Cop Out was first titled A Couple of Dicks, which didn't swing (he-he), then A Couple of Cops, (according to Willis, Cop Suckers was also in play ...), but then Smith thought Cop Out was fun, because it was what the title would be, (a cop out from something sexually suggestive.) You could say the whole film is a cop out. Especially the funny Morgan deserves better as a rising comedy star. The vulgarity was retained somewhat on the film's posters with the tagline ('Rock out with you Glock out'). Cop Out premiered #2 behind Shutter Island (2010) and made 44.8 mil. $ (81 % of its total gross) in the US.]

What do you think of Smith's Cop Out?
Other examples of original filmmakers stepping in it to get to that golden studio paycheck/recognition?