Awesome: a group of people hole up in a diner in the middle of the desert because it turns out God has sent an army of angels down to wipe out the human race, and one of these people is pregnant with a baby that will be humanity’s salvation. It’s gonna be war, man, war with countless angels. One of the people in the diner is the Arch Angle Michael. Yeah, this is gonna be sweet. Theoretically.
On a practical level, it’s a mess. This is what happens sometimes when you let a Visual Effects guy write and direct his own script. He’s worked on lots of big, successful films before this, so I guess that’s how he got so many names to star in it. Well, Dennis Quaid has been known to take the stinker script now and again, and Charles Dutton has made a nice career of doing lower grade fare. Most of the others here are fairly new or young actors that were just looking to pad their resume. Why Paul Bettany did this I’ll never know. And are we to believe that Kate Walsh, from the TV show Private Practice, couldn’t find something better to do with her time while on break from her show? No hobbies, Kate? She could’ve taken up knitting, or stamp collecting to pass the time. At least she could’ve done another one of those sexy Cadillac commercials. But wow, this? I hope they paid you a boatload of cash, Kate.
The acting is just adequate, but let’s face it, they’re all doing what they can with what they’ve been given, which is crap. Seriously, this thing is such a cluster-fuck. The exposition is so rushed, and then crazy things start happening immediately and the characters, who have known each other all of an hour, suddenly start bonding like life-long lovers. You want stupid dialogue? You came to the right place. This movie toyed with the idea of hilarity, but didn’t even commit enough to camp it up. If I could at least have had that cheesy delight, it would have had that going for it. But it was too dark most of the time to make the laughs of any real value, other than to make it more of a suck-fest.
Was there tons of awesome, bloody Angel fighting? No. Not NEARLY enough Angel-battling action. I really was expecting an awesome all-out war, but there is too much blabbity-blab that stops action sequences that should be bigger, grander, and possess better than the average visual effects used. Speaking of which, director Scott Stewart, you were a visual effects guy, why aren’t your visual effects AMAZING?! This doesn’t cut it.
Also, this movie seemed to drift between being a grand epic, and being a smaller, more personal story. Identity crisis, anyone? AND, it was derivative of a bunch of other movies, Terminator being only one of them.
The weird thing is, there are fleeting moments where Paul Bettany as Michael, and Kevin Durand as Arch Angel Gabriel have these conversations and there is a glimmer of something interesting. I was reminded of stuff from the comic book series, Lucifer, from DC Vertigo comics. I thought, maybe there would be some morsel to be saved from this debacle. But as quickly as I had that feeling, it was gone.
Don’t see this movie. Just don’t. You’ll be mad at it, the people who made it, and yourself for buying the ticket. In fact, instead, I highly recommend reading the aforementioned DC Vertigo series, Lucifer.
—Neil T. Weakley, your average movie-goer, thinking this was a Legion of suck.
