By Ted Baldwin

     This is no gift. Less than two hours and it feels like two and a half.

     Arnold is miscast in a movie role that Bruce Willis apparently did not want.

     What a sorry waste. This lumbering movie would have rocketed twenty years ago, post-Exorcist, but today it is only a letdown from a man who gave us the likes of The Relic, Timecop, Narrow Margin, The Presidio, Running Scared, The Star Chamber, Outland, Hanover Street, and Capricorn One. Wait a minute. I liked the ideas behind those films more than I liked the films, with the exception of Narrow Margin... Maybe I just do not like this director's work.

     Arnold is supposed to be a suicidal (a-la-Riggs, I guess), alcoholic (Here is where Bruce Willis usually gets signed on to do the role), ex-cop with a buddy played by Kevin Pollak (in the Tom Arnold role, I suppose). It does not work in the least, and there is no chemistry between any of the stars and Robin Tunney. So no point in hashing it out.

     All in all, Arnold must help keep a young girl from getting Satan-ized in the 11th hour before the millennium. All of the machinations between Satan and Arnold lack luster, and are boring. There is no fire, despite the pyrotechnics, and we really don't believe at any time that Arnold has any chance.

     Even at the end, his piteous scrabbling for faith is handled ineptly and without true triumph. To believe this ending is to believe that the only way to serve your God is to fall on your sword for Him.

     The reason we cannot buy any of this?

     Satan has too much power one minute, and is helpless the next. His/its inability to find a 20 year old girl is not believable, and his screwing around until he does find her is not a pretty sight. They also play him for comic relief(!!!!!), but his smarmy smart-assiness is out of perspective for what he is.

     For instance, why take the trouble to kill one kid on a skateboard (for insolence) when he has the whole world to put down?

     Maddeningly, Satan is unevenly and coyly played by Gabriel Byrne in an overwritten role made palatable only because DeNiro/Pacino was not cast in it. It is beyond old hat to have a slick, stylish, rich, investment banker type for Satan. Give us something original!

     What I went looking for was an apocalypse where the world goes to hell and Arnold has to put it right. Like the TV ads intimated.

     But the masses of screaming New Year's (stock footage) partygoers are never endangered, there is no mass slaughter, no destruction of Biblical Proportion. Some lame storefront blasts and sewer eruptions - seen it all before. Ghost Busters did this better. (A friend remarked that this plot was like that of GBII - been a while since I have seen it, but feel free to contrast and compare.) Instead, Arnold has to put out a fire that has not started yet.

     LUDICROUS PLOT POINT: One special aspect of the plot is ludicrous, and if they had done any research at all, they would have known instantly. The idea that a Masonic Order of Murdering Knights can exist in secret in the Holy Roman Catholic Church is so laughable that it begs exposure. The Church has been wholly anti-Masonic for ages, especially in their persecution of Masons of all stripes in the last thousand years. Only recently have they stopped excommunicating those joining the Masons.

Add to it that this "secret" order wears a loud red heart medallion and presto! Reviewer fodder.

     Visual Cliche' of the week: The lip-biting, all-knowing, character-comes-into enlightenment, partial nod. The way to signify someone "gets it" is to have them nod to themselves. Willis has been doing it a lot (see Sixth Sense). Stop it.