"I wonder if that was from the pastrami rueben I had yesterday?"

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Review: The Prophecy

It seemed like a bargain - 6 movies for 5 dollars.  Of course, all six movies were The Prophecy 1 through 6, but my brain ignored that inconvenient fact (along with the fact that this was a grocery store hawking dvd's in a bargain bin) and I happily deposited the 6-movies-on-3-DVDs set in my cart.

Mind you, I still have a 6 month old in my house and have zero time to watch movies.  That, and the infant currently sleeps in the same room as the main DVD player.  (Incidentally this is the reason I've watched T.V. exclusively on mute with closed captioning for the last 6 months.)  I thought I could make it work.  I saw my opportunity when my wife left for a few hours with the baby for a support group for (relatively) new moms.  Dishes be darned, laundry be darned, porch in desperate need of sanding and painting be darned, I was going to watch a movie and get my .833333 cents worth. 

My view could be squewed by the fact that I was giddy to be watching anything with the sound turned on, but Prophecy wasn't exactly bad.  Well, the 30 minutes of it I watched weren't bad.  Then I stopped.  I doubt this is a spoiler to anyone who cares, but the film seemed to be centered on certain angels, led by Gabriel (played by the ever-creepy Christopher Walken) instigating a second war in heaven (the first having been led by lucifer).  I got to the point where Walken fries a hapless Eric Stoltz (who is an angel on the 'good' side, if any side is good in this film) and stopped watching.

An asside:  there are certain things I don't watch, ever, even if they're corny.  One of them is the show Ghost Hunters, because I refuse to take ghosts seriously or watch anyone else who does the same.  This is because I am weak minded and would have trouble sleeping for the rest of my life if I believed for a second that there were dead people from every past generation floating around houses just waiting to cover me in ectoplasm.  Another thing I don't watch are films that take certain liberties with certain... figures, let's say. 

Gabriel, I'm told, was the angel who let Mary know she would soon be pregnant.  Gabriel is an archangel, right up there with Michael and pre-fall lucifer.  There is no way he turned into Christopher Walken, no matter how bad a day he had.  It just couldn't happen.  If they had made up a name for Walken's character other than Gabriel, I might not have taken issue with the film.  There are other films with angels in them that I've watched -  Constatine, for example.  Now that's a bad film (that I enjoyed watching), and exactly why that was palatable to me and Prophecy wasn't is a thing I can't exactly put into words.  Perhaps I can't take a film seriously with Shia Lebeouf in it.

I'm sorry that this is a review of a film, rather, 30 minutes of a  film that I stopped watching due to my own foibles.  There aren't many.  Add Prophecy movies to the list.  There you have it.  There were cool parts, like a recent suicide victim acting as Walken's lackey for a time with the promise that he'd be really dead once his service was over.  I liked that angels perch on things like ravens while they're observing things. 

Yep.  Might be a cool film.  I'll never know.  And I'm not watching the other 5 to find how they turn out, either.

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