Yesterday and while feeling myself in a mental fog (don’t ask…and, no, it has nothing to do with drugs or alcohol, neither of which I consume), I was flipping through the channels and hoping to get my feet on the ground (figuratively) when I caught the start of the 1995 film The Prophecy.
I’d heard about the film and knew there were several sequels made to it (according to Wikipedia, this film has produced four sequels). I also knew it had the delightfully off-kilter Christopher Walken in it as the bad-guy and so I stuck around and watched it.
Wow.
Look, the movie is, at best, a fairly low budget “B” movie with a pseudo-religious plot that doesn’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense.
Counterpoint: You have Christopher freaking Walken playing the angel Gabriel, who walks the Earth and talks in your typical Christopher Walkenese while hunting down a soul hidden from him…a soul which would lead to the end of a war in the heavens which, we’re told, is stalemated.
Christopher Walken’s Gabriel is indeed your badguy, and he’s an absolute hoot, turning from “nice” to “nasty” with remarkable ease. If there’s any real negative to say about this film (other than the fact that the plot is silly as hell), it is the fact that the movie should have had Mr. Walken in every scene.
Anyway, back to the plot.
So you have this evil soul hidden in the body of some military man who dies of old age and the angel Simon (Eric Stoltz in what amounts to a semi-long cameo) takes the soul from his body and hides it in the body of a little girl (Moriah Shining Dove Snyder) while Gabriel and his minions try to get their hands on it. As stated before, this soul is so evil having it on Gabriel’s side will give him an advantage in the eons long War of Heaven.
Simon enlists the aid of a former priest, now policeman named Thomas Dagget (Elias Koteas) to…I dunno, help or keep his eyes peeled or something. Gabriel eventually finds and kills Simon while Dagget, close behind, figures out the little girl is the target and, with the help of Katherine (Virginia Madsen), the little girl’s teacher, they hold off Gabriel and try to free the girl of the evil extra soul she carries. Got it?!
Look, we’re not talking Casablanca here.
But for some at times cheesy fun and a wonderful evil performance by Christopher Walken, plus a you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it cameo by another pretty big named actor at the end of the film (I won’t give him away…suffice to say he was in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and, like Mr. Walken, his appearance in the film is a total hoot), you could do a lot worse than spend some time with The Prophecy.