Review of The Prophecy (1995) by Graham P — 16 May 2008

A bizarre biblical fantasy about a war between angels loyal to god, and a bunch of renegades who want to wipe out an ungreatful mankind; the Prophecy is a low budget supernatural horror and vehicle for Christopher Walken to flex his over-acting muscles in a number of entertaining scenes between himself and a rather more sedate supporting cast (with the exception of one stand-out cameo performance which I will mention later). The fact that he has so much screen time, and is allowed to really ham it up with gusto whenever he does show up is the one thing that raises this movie above the level of straight-to-dvd mediocraty.

Truly Walken, as the archangel Gabriel, is the whole reason to sit through the, admittedly fairly short, tale concerning police detective Tommy Dagget (Elias Koteas) who is haunted by visions of horrific battles between angels in heaven, and who discovers what turns out to be the corpse of one of these angels at a murder scene.

Dagget's investigations take him into the desert to a community of native americans; one of whom has been possessed by the soul of THE MOST EVIL MAN IN THE WORLD. Note that this is not Stalin, Hitler or Walt Disney. Gabriel wants this soul for his own nefarious purposes and so Dagget must fight the renegade angel. And to do this he'll need help from Satan himself.

Yes, Lucifer also makes an appearance in this movie, and he's played in fantastic form by Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn himself). Mortensen's performance is probably equally as marvellous as Walken's, even if he only gets about ten minutes of devillish fun. One can well see that, in this early screen performance, he was certainly an obvious candidate for bigger and better things.

The ending is somewhat anticlimatic (and piles on Christian values just a little too thickly for an atheist like me to stomach easily), but this is overall an entertaining feature with enough action and humour to please casual viewers. It was popular enough to spawn four sequels, two with Walken which are more of the same but with tighter budget constraints.