God has lost faith in humanity. He has ordered his army of angels to exterminate us, but one of his most faithful, the Archangel, Michael, disagrees. He flees heaven, loses his wings and halo, and precedes to arm himself in order to protect a pregnant woman who's child could save humanity. Michael holds up in a rickety diner and garage run by cliche rednecks and visited by cliche out-of-towners, where said pregnant woman happens to work.
The movie has A-list effects working through a B-movie creative process. A lot of time and effort seems directed at the action and design. There's explosions, gunfire, and some pretty excellent gore. A small amount of survivors fight off an ever-growing horde of angel-possessed people zombie apocalypse -style. There is an intense one on one between Archangels Gabriel and Michael, Gabriel armed with some medieval mace/chainsaw thing that was kind of cool looking. The spectacle of the movie was very entertaining even if just in a cheeseball way, but it falls just short of being watchable B-movie fare.
The dialog during the downtime between action scenes is horrendous. The screenwriters show no real knack for natural speech. Everything sounds forced and wordy and worst of all, scripted. The likes of Dennis Quaid and Charles S. Dutton, who have proven themselves capable of compelling work, even Kate Walsh's time on television has proven she has some acting chops, fail miserably with the dialog. With zero expectations from Lucas Black and Adrianne Palicki who have never been impressive, there is very little to save the dramatic elements.
Of course there is Paul Bettany and Kevin Durand. Bettany brings in a very memorable role. On the action side, he proved to be an effective hero, something I was always skeptical about on his part. On the dramatic side, he was able to show a special type of earnestness derived from a being not capable of free will yet still disobeying a direct order from his master anyway. Durand on the other hand does a lot with what little screentime he has. His loyalty to God and eagerness to obey even when pitted against his brother evokes genuine emotion. His snarls and attacks read of anger and determination, but his eyes read of sadness and remorse.
Plot holes are abound. The true nature of the child is never revealed. Christ-Reborn? Anti-Christ? Something else altogether? It is an agonizing lack of information. For all its Christian theology, the concepts of God being omnipotent and omniscient seem completely lost. A group of untrained strangers fought off his army for an impressive amount of time when God could have snapped his fingers and sent them to nonexistence, and Michael's attempt to prove to God that not all humanity is selfish and evil and that they are still worth fighting for seems useless in the face of a being with all the answers. Then again if these plotholes were addressed than the movie would be much shorter.
There are strong attempts to make a guilty pleasure cult classic here, but no amount of gun-toting fallen angels could save the completely flat storyline. My own interest in Christian mythology kept me mildly interested to see it finish, but if you want to see a good movie about angels, see The Prophecy instead.
3/10
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