Arnold Schwarzenegger had fought armies, aliens, robots, and entire governments by the time End of Days arrived in 1999.
Satan presented a different problem.
You can’t really punch him.
That’s what makes End of Days more interesting than its reputation as a giant late-’90s action-horror mashup suggests. The movie puts one of cinema’s most physically dominant stars into a story built around something he can’t overpower. Jericho Cane can unload a gun, crash through a building, and take an absurd amount of punishment, but none of that means much when his opponent is literally the Devil.
So what happens when being Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t enough?
The movie spends a surprising amount of time breaking him down.
Jericho isn’t introduced as another indestructible Schwarzenegger machine. He’s a wreck. His wife and daughter have been murdered, his apartment looks miserable, he drinks too much, and the breakfast smoothie he throws together — leftover pizza included — tells us almost everything we need to know. This guy is alive because he hasn’t figured out how not to be.
Peter Hyams shoots New York accordingly. End of Days rarely looks inviting. Churches, tunnels, apartments, and streets disappear into shadows and dirty light. Even before Jericho understands what is happening, the movie looks like the world has already started rotting around him.
Then Gabriel Byrne walks into it.
Byrne’s Satan works best when he isn’t doing anything obviously supernatural. He wears an expensive suit, speaks quietly, and treats human weakness like something mildly amusing. Against Schwarzenegger’s size and physicality, Byrne barely has to move. That contrast matters. Jericho understands violence. Satan understands Jericho.
And the movie keeps finding ways to make that distinction hurt.
Gunfire can knock the Devil across a room, but it doesn’t solve anything. Explosions buy time. Chases create distance. Every big action beat eventually circles back to the same problem: Jericho has spent his life believing survival comes through force, and he has finally met something force cannot fix.
That makes the movie’s excess strangely appropriate.
End of Days wants to be a supernatural horror, religious thriller, and Schwarzenegger blockbuster all at once. Sometimes those pieces grind against each other. Other times that collision becomes the whole appeal. A satanic conspiracy can lead directly into automatic weapons and subway destruction without the movie seeing any contradiction whatsoever.
Its soundtrack belongs to that same moment. Korn, Rob Zombie, Limp Bizkit, Eminem, and Guns N’ Roses surround the movie with another layer of late-’90s grime. Biblical apocalypse gets dragged into 1999 instead of being left in some timeless gothic world. This isn’t ancient evil arriving at a castle.
It’s Satan showing up while Times Square prepares for Y2K.
Underneath all that noise, End of Days eventually realizes something important about its own star.
The final battle cannot be won because Jericho shoots straighter, hits harder, or finds a bigger weapon. His real fight is whether a man who has lost faith in almost everything can still make one meaningful choice when brute force finally stops working.
That is where End of Days becomes more than Arnold versus Satan.
For most of his career, Schwarzenegger played characters who survived because they were stronger than whatever stood in front of them. End of Days puts him against an enemy he cannot physically defeat and asks what remains when strength is no longer enough.
The answer is sacrifice.
For once, Arnold doesn’t save the world because he is unstoppable.
He saves it because he finally accepts that he isn’t.
Written by Rob Joncas for DeadNoteMedia.
© 2026 DeadNoteMedia. All rights reserved.
