The Prophecy isn’t that good of a movie, but I’ll be damned if I wasn’t involved by the end. Most of my engagement came from watching stars (and proto-stars) like Christopher Walken, Eric Stoltz, Virginia Madsen, Elias Koteas, and Viggo Mortensen delivering more than this kind of material deserves. Because, really, this material’s pretty dumb. The angel Gabriel (Walken) tires of a stalemate war between Heaven and Hell, so he wants to tip the balance by sucking up an evil soul before the heroic Simon (Stoltz) can. See, an angel can suck up a soul by kissing its owner, which leads to a scene where Simon, desperate to find a hiding spot for the evil soul, kisses a little Hispanic girl. Awkward.
Native American mysticism clashes with the film's Abrahamic foundation.
Gregory Widen (Highlander, Backdraft) concocted this absurdity, which begat two sequels starring Walken, which begat two more absent of Walken. He also directed, and his style consists of long shots filled with warm light and a minimum of optical effects. Lidless black eyes and bodies lit aflame. No big wings. No overdone halos or reveals of Heaven. For a movie with such a wacky premise, everything looks tangible. There’s even a scene where a morgue attendant dissects an angel and observes that the body's cellular makeup shares similarities with fetuses.
Curiously, the film never steps outside its three chief angels, Gabriel, Lucifer, and Simon (there’s no Simon in angelology, but hey). Despite the hundreds of angels on record and theoretical hundreds of thousands who sing Glory forever, the film focuses on this trio, and, while the film’s idea of character development is flat exposition, the story nonetheless grows in interest. Gabriel wants the evil soul to tip the balance, just so the angelic war can end, but Lucifer (Mortensen, lithe and convincing) knows that if the forces of evil have the edge, Heaven will just become another Hell, and that's no fun for anybody. Satan hasn’t been this even-minded since the South Park movie.
The War of Heaven...I guess. I don't know. Anyway, it's cool-looking.
The human heroes, Thomas (Koteas) and Katherine (Madsen), don’t carry nearly as much interest, especially Katherine, whose allegiance to her charge (the little Hispanic girl now suffering from post-transferred-soul-disorder), never gets a convincing explanation. Thomas, a clergyman-turned-cop, gets more attention, mostly for his visions of the angelic war. At the end of the film, we hear the obligatory voice-over where he monologues about the importance of faith, but can you call it faith when Gabriel’s torching bodies in a hospital? When Satan’s perched on a gravestone, cheerily telling you that he’s “always open, even on Christmas”? Faith resides in the gap between knowledge and mystery, and when angels are walking around in stylish duds, resurrecting corpses and fuming about God, the gap vanishes.
Those types of considerations are better explored in evocative religious films like The Passion of Joan of Arc and The Seventh Seal and even The Exorcist, which truly engage with their subjects. Gregory Widen’s not only out of their league, he’s not all that interested in such questions. His interest lies in fashioning a good pulp story out of his material, and thanks to his skill behind the camera and his good fortune with casting, he wrings some fun out of his premise. Not enough that you’ll want to see four more movies about angel-wars, but enough that The Prophecy plays as well-crafted nonsense.
RATING: B
All is made right by Walken lighting a corpse on fire without even looking.
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