The Prophecy 3: The Ascent (2000)

So we finally come to the end of the original run of "The Prophecy" series with "The Prophecy 3: The Ascent." I can't say my expectations we exceedingly high for this one, despite the intriguing ending of "The Prophecy II" and the return of Christopher Walken for his last outing as Gabriel. I guess at this point I'm just expecting a steady decrease in quality as sequels continue. That's probably a healthy attitude to have.

Were my lowered expectations required for this one? Well, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that it wasn't as bad as I had feared. At the very least, it didn't make me mad while watching it. Most of the time. The bad news is that the only reason it wasn't as bad as I feared was because I was expecting something along the lines of "The Touch of Satan," only without Mike Nelson making it hilarious. So anything would have been a step up from that.

That may be a little harsh, to be perfectly honest. It's not that "The Prophecy 3" was a train-wreck, it's just that the train made an uneventful trip across the country without any major delays or problems. It arrived at it's destination on time, and nearly every passenger slept for the majority of the journey. And when they're asked by relatives waiting at the station "How was your trip?" they will say "It was fine. They had good sandwiches at the food bar." That's the level of enthusiasm I have with this thing. It's right up there with the inane small talk you're forced to make in polite company you can't swear in front of. True, the train didn't go off the rails, but at least that would have been more interesting.

Shockingly, no. Not even this bit of randomness makes for an entertaining film.

If you couldn't tell by that tenuous analogy, the problem with this film is that it was not very memorable. It's only notable for how bland it was, and the fact that I can use the word "bland" to describe a movie starring Christopher Walken is probably the biggest offense of all. And to my surprise, one of the biggest reasons for it being bland is a direct consequence of the ending of "The Prophecy II," which I was a fan of. But I'll get back to that in a bit. For now just remember that Christopher Walken is no longer a powerful angel.

The third film picks up about 18 years after the end of the second one. At the end of that film, Gabriel was turned into a human by either God or Eric Roberts (it was hard to tell), as punishment for his hubris and betrayal. In the time since then, he's learned how to drive, learned to kind of like humanity, and has learned how to grow hair like that witch in "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves." So he's just chilling, enjoying being a human. He has also been (kind of) looking after Danyael (Dave Buzzotta), the human/angel child from the end of the second movie. His mother Valerie, the main character from the that film, has died in the time between after a seemingly random mob burned down their house, leaving her dead and him unscathed since he's impossible to kill unless you remove his heart, being half angel.

Now we find that the forces of heaven are still at war, and they once again need an ace in the hole to turn the conflict. Enter the fray Zophael (Vincent Spano), an angel who's loyalty is obviously to the side of "Kill All Humans," but whose motivations I never really got apart from "He's the bad guy." From what I gather he's attempting to resurrect Pyriel, the Angel of Genocide, who will arise to eradicate mankind. Pyriel was the angel who lead God's army against Lucifer in the first war. How Pyriel died, how he has risen, who if anyone is responsible for that, why he is now on the side of the rebel angels, why they never tried this before if he's so powerful, and why apparently only Danyael can stop him is left completely unexplained, at least for as much as I understood the plot here.

Just a couple simple questions, here, buddy. Who are you? What are you doing? How did you get here? And why is this the first I've heard of you?

So what it all boils down to is that Danyael goes to the desert to stop Pyriel, while Zophael kidnaps Danyael's girlfriend Maggie, lies to her that Pyriel's resurrection is a good thing, and gets her to give him a ride to try and stop Danyael from stopping Pyriel. So much like the other two films, "The Prophecy 3" is a chase movie featuring an angel being chauffeured around in a car out to the middle of nowhere by someone who hates their guts. Says something for consistency, I guess.

And while it was kind of a neat thing that angels in this series can't drive cars since it's just not their thing, a pretty big question I had since the first film has to be addressed at some point here: Why don't the angels fly? They have wings. I don't know where the angels hide them under their black trench coats, but I've seen them. Wouldn't flying be much faster than driving? Why is Zophael even running after Danyael when they're on foot? Danyael doesn't have wings. Zophael does. If you want to stop him, just fly and catch up to him. Whatever. Stupid nitpick, I know, but it's still irritating to me.

In the background doing essentially nothing throughout all this is Gabriel, who just drives around in his convertible. And then he stops by that diner from the first film and orders a big breakfast. At least I understood that bit, although there's probably a deleted scene somewhere with a prophecy about whether he was going to order the buttermilk or blueberry pancakes.

"And lo! it was foretold that he of Doc Brown hair and saggy face would feast upon the Grand Slam and a pot of half-caf." GEN 15:27

And finally, we reach the end of the movie. Danyael confronts Pyriel in a showdown that had the potential to be cool and visually interesting. But unfortunately it winds up seeming more like a fighting game tutorial teaching you how to do your finishing move for as one sided as it is and for as long as it lasts, while looking like the background glitched out and was just solid black. And then, because that wasn't unsatisfying enough, Danyael is literally saved by a bolt of lighting out of the sky, sent directly by God to help Danyael defeat Pyriel.

What.

Well, if God always had the capacity to do that, then why in the name of holy crackers didn't he do that from the get-go? And you can't tell me that old "His ways are mysterious" story because that makes no sense. They say at the end of the movie that Pyriel's defeat signals the end of the war. If striking Pyriel down was always an option, why go through the whole rigamarole of thousands of years of horrible conflict and countless deaths and destruction? What an ass!

And you can't tell me that humanity had to be the ones to do it because Danyael is not fully human, and even if he was, they didn't because at the end God strikes down Pyriel anyway. I'm not even going to get too into the issue of no human soul reaching heaven before that point because of this conflict. But I'm just saying that when you consider that, according to the mythology, God went through all that trouble to send Jesus down to absolve humanity of its sins, only to have another easily fixable situation arise to throw a wrench into the whole plan, it kind of makes God look either lazy, incompetent, or like a big jerk. But that's just me.

It makes him seem less like a divine creator and more like a crappy roommate who never does anything. He never takes out the trash, never cleans the dishes, never buy groceries, never walks the dog, and always leaves his excess weed trimmings all over the living room table. And then one day he takes down a phone message for you in overly exacting detail and expects that to make up for the time he left a bowl of mac n' cheese in the sink for two weeks until it crusted over and attracted ants.

"Dude, come on. I left a post-it note on the fridge. You're welcome, by the way. Hey, could you give me a ride to and from work tomorrow? They got me working the night shift. I need to be there at 3 AM. Thanks, bro. You can pick me up at 10."

That's always been my biggest issue with this series. The story makes absolutely no sense, and I seldom follow the plot while watching it. It's only afterwards when I hop on Wikipedia and read the synopsis that I say to myself "Is THAT what was going on here? Dang, religion makes stuff dumb and confusing." I say that without trying to be offensive to anyone, but you can't argue that the insane amount of contradictions, self-fulfilling prophecies and nonsense explained with the catch-all "God is mysterious" excuse does not make for a very cohesive narrative. This is doubly so when one does something stupid like apply logic to something that is by its very nature illogical.

At this point I'd like to return, finally, to what I was saying earlier about what I felt was the biggest issue with "The Prophecy 3," which was what they did with Christopher Walken's character. The worst offense this movie did was to take Gabriel's powers away and make him a good guy. It's not until you've seen a movie in this series without the madcap antics of crazy, evil Walken that you realize how important that is to the entertainment value of these films. Let's be honest, these were never fantastic movies, but the character of Gabriel was such a memorable badass that he made the first films worth watching by himself alone.

Now what do we have? Gabriel has been relegated to being a side character who doesn't do anything because he can't do anything. He can't even offer assistance in a fight apart from running into someone with his car, which he does, but after that he immediately gets his ass handed to him by Zophael, who doesn't kill him for the sole reason that he's so pathetic that it's not worth either his time or energy. And Gabriel just sits there and smiles like he's managed to accomplish something by becoming meeker than Zophael when he used to be the Angel of Death.

Oh yeah. Serene and contemplative. That's how I like my Christopher Walken. I also like to garnish my pizza with a single saltine cracker.

It's not that Gabriel's redemption is a bad character arc, because it's not. It's just not something I'm interested in seeing in this film. Or at least they way it was done here. Had I been in charge of the script I would have kept Gabriel human, but he'd still be attempting to eradicate humanity by resurrecting Pyriel. Had he been the villain instead of Zophael the plot could have been nearly the same, and his redemption could have been slowly building throughout until the end, when he could fully realize the error of his ways. That way his character development could have actually been seen during the film as opposed to off screen between movies.

Honestly there wasn't a good thing I can say about anyone else in the cast, either. Christopher Walken is wasted, Dave Buzzotta is a poor man's Edward Furlong, and Vincent Spano does his best to come off like Gael Garcia Bernal, but again it's just not working that well. Although Spano isn't honestly that bad, especially when he is forced to act next to the worst actor in the film, Kayren Butler as Danyael's girlfriend. She reminded me a bit of Shannon from "Lost," only with less talent than even Maggie Grace and the bizarre ability to seemingly teleport in and out of scenes at random due to the power of bad script writing and confusing editing.

And by the way, any movie that casts Brad Dourif as a crazy person and kills him off after 5 minutes and about 3 lines can officially kiss my ass. I don't care if there's a scene later where a dude licks his corpse's eyeball. If Brad can't react to it, I'm not interested.

Danyael is the only 32 year old 18 year old in the world.

Oh, and Moriah 'Shining Dove' Snyder is back as Mary. She's a bit more grown up now. She still isn't a good actress, but she's only in it for 25 seconds. She has a little speech that barely has any context to anything we've been seeing, doesn't do a damn thing, and basically wastes our time. But hey, this thing is only like 80 minutes long already. I guess something had to pad it out. I'm sure she wasn't doing anything else as these movies have been pretty much the only thing she's ever been in.

And who in the blue hell ascended in this movie subtitled "The Ascent?" It wasn't Danyael, because he's still on Earth. It wasn't Pyriel because his ascent was stopped cold. Was it Gabriel?  I guess that makes sense, but that seems an odd choice because he's not even the main character, or even that important to the story. And his ascent and forgiveness is only the last 20 seconds of the movie. Seems an odd thing to subtitle your movie after. That'd be like calling it "Star Wars Episode IV: Luke Gets a Medal."

Of course the real answer is that it's a cool word that sounds ominous but means jack-diddly. I think that's a requirement for naming sequels in Hollywood. I still don't know why they couldn't just leave it at "The Prophecy 3." Or why they used the number 3 instead of Roman numerals considering the last movie did. Or why this is the last film in the series to be numbered at all. I guess it's really easy to tell which comes next chronologically - "The Prophecy: Uprising" or "The Prophecy: Forsaken." Come on, isn't it clearly obvious which one comes next? What are you, dense?

Does nobody put forth the slightest bit of effort with this stuff? And why am I constantly surprised by the fact that they don't?

Want to see something funny? Watch that chick attempt to act in the trailer. And then despair. She's in the whole movie.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "The Prophecy 3: The Ascent" is clearly a big step down from the sequel, which in itself was just okay. Despite some interesting imagery it never manages to become more than the same stuff we've seen before, only without the benefit of having a good cast or giving Walken fun things to do, and it's just a boring movie. Considering that the plot is nonsense anyway, I don't even know if I'd recommend watching it to finish the story, because hell if I know what just happened.

The Prophecy (1995)

You know, if all evil creatures were as entertaining as Christopher Walken, I don't think the Forces of Darkness would be that unappealing. Just think about it. You'd probably be in a army of warriors headed by Walken, Christopher Lee, Jeremy Irons, Gary Oldman, Brad Dourif, Willem Dafoe and Vincent Price. That would be awesome. I'd sign up for the entertainment value alone. I mean, who's going to be on the side of Good? Morgen Freeman? True, it would be more soothing to the ear, but come on. The shenanigans wouldn't be nearly as fun.

"The Prophecy" is a film from 1995 with arguable "cult" status that launched a franchise that is currently at 5 films so far, with all of them but this first one being direct-to-video. I'm not sure as to the reason behind that, as it seems to me that there are far worse franchises that are still getting theatrical releases. I'm not saying this is a fantastic bunch of movies, but for the most part they are a cut above your average straight-to-DVD affair. And hey, the first 3 have Christopher Walken! What's not to like?

The plot concerns a second war in heaven between angels. Half of the angels stay loyal to God while the other half, led by the Angel of Death, Gabriel (Christopher Walken) rebel against their creator, and want to eradicate mankind. The reason for that is because they are envious of humans, who are seen as elevated over all other creatures, including angels, in God's eyes. This war has been raging for thousands of years, and because of it no mortal soul has ever yet reached Heaven.

In a bid to turn the tide of the conflict, Gabriel comes down to earth to find the darkest human soul on the planet, in the form of a recently deceased Army officer who did very, very bad things in what I'm guessing was Vietnam. The reasoning is that angels, being pure creatures, don't have it in them to be as brutal and knowledgeable in warfare as humans do, so to win the war they need a human to lead them. Of course the scenes of angels beating the feathers off each other in hand to hand combat and ripping out and then eating their enemy's heart suggests otherwise, but in context of the film it kind of works. I don't think you're supposed to think too much about it.

Before they can come to fruition, Gabriel's plans are ruined by an angel on the "good side," Simon (Eric Stoltz), who finds the soul first. Gabriel spends the rest of the movie chasing after Simon and the soul, which becomes doubly hard to find after Simon takes it and hides it in the body of a young girl in a scene that's totally not creepy at all and in no way makes me need an adult.

No, seriously dude. There has to be other ways of transferring a soul. I'm calling "bad touch."

That's all happening in the background as we are following our main character, Thomas Dagget (Elias Koteas), a cop and expert on angels who was going to be a priest before a horrific vision of the war in Heaven made him quit. Incidentally that's one of my favorite things about "The Prophecy" - the fact that Dagget's character lost his faith not because he doesn't believe, but because he knows for a fact that it's true, and he's horrified by what he has seen.

Dagget becomes involved with the whole debacle while investigating a crime scene where Simon had killed another angel. Upon seeing the very strange and medically impossible body of the dead angel and translating the angel's bible, which is the oldest in existence and contains an additional chapter in Revelations which tells of the second war in Heaven and prophesies future events, Dagget realizes what is going on and heads out to find the soul.

Elias Koteas is unsurprisingly great in the role, since he's awesome in pretty much everything he does, although it's a trip seeing him with hair, I'm not going to lie. He and Eric Stoltz add some great acting chutzpah to the movie, but the guy who pops up at the end to steal the show in whatever scene he's in is an actor who at that time was still relatively obscure - Viggo Mortensen. This was some 6 years before "Lord of The Rings," and get this - here he plays Lucifer. And it's a really good portrayal as well. He's got this cutting quietness to his delivery, as is Viggo's style, but he injects it with this fantastic, slimy evil which really pops when he sneers great lines like "God? God is love. I don't love you."

 Also, he eats someone's heart. There's that, too.

But when it all comes down to it, there's only one real reason to watch "The Prophecy": Christopher Walken. Few things in life are as fun as watching an actor like Walken having an absolute blast doing his job. He's hamming it up magnificently here, but the great thing about Walken is that even when he's being an absolute nutjob and seeming like he's on another plane of consciousness with the wackiness he's emanating, he's still capable of being really creepy and surprisingly badass.

His trademark brand of manic, wide-eyed, oddly inflectioned performance full of grand gestures and alternating higher-pitched vocal burnouts and subterranean growls is capable of inciting a lot of laughter, especially when he's given lines like "Study your math, kids. Key to the Universe." But just as often as he makes us laugh, the admittedly top-notch dialog in "The Prophecy" hits us with Walken sneering lines like "I'm an angel. I kill firstborns while their mamas watch. I turn cities into salt. I even, when I feel like it, rip the souls from little girls, and from now till kingdom come, the only thing you can count on in your existence is never understanding why."

Damn, son.

Following him around are the other two people who make "The Prophecy" come off as something of a dark comedy at times: Jerry (Adam Goldberg) and then later in the film Rachael (Amanda Plummer). They're both people who have recently died whom Gabriel brings back from the dead to drive him around and use any kind of technology, since Gabriel being an angel has no concept of how to use a car or computer or radio or anything like that. And they are not big fans of Gabriel. Both of them, but particularly Jerry snarks back to Gabriel all the time, wearily asking if he can just die and be done with it, and taking pleasure in whatever is currently causing Gabriel grief. This makes up most of the funnier parts of the film, which are honestly pretty funny. Rachael mostly just cries. She's not exactly hardcore like Honey Bunny, unfortunately.

If the characters walk into a diner in this series, it's going to be a great scene. Dead serious.

The acting isn't all great though. Moriah Shining Dove Snyder playing Mary, the little girl who is carrying the soul around inside her, isn't the worst child actor I've seen, but she's not very good. She does have her moments, particularly a scene when the soul's words are coming out of her mouth and giving a creepy monologue about cutting off heads, but for every one of those scenes we have to watch 10 minutes of her just standing there with this weird, buck-toothed, open-mouthed expression which is just annoying to look at. She reminds me of that terrible kid actor who played Danny in that horrific TV version of "The Shining," if anyone was unlucky enough to see that travesty. But she's not nearly that bad, and I guess she was better than Virgina Madsen. At least I'm remembering Moriah's performance, which is more than I can say for Virgina.

There's only a couple real issues I have with "The Prophecy." The first is that the story gets a little confusing as it winds down, and I never quite understood why it was that Lucifer ends up helping Dagget. It had something to do with Heaven becoming another Hell (which obviously is something Lucifer won't tolerate), but that aspect of the plot never really solidified for me. The other thing is that there were a couple scenes that seemed a little out of place and never followed up on again, almost like there's missing bits. The most notable one that comes to mind is a scene where Simon and Dagget meet and start talking, only to have the scene suddenly end, with Dagget never mentioning that he talked to an angel afterwards.

And what exactly happens when you kill an angel? Do they just go back home?

Does all that ruin "The Prophecy?" Naw. It just makes it a movie you're not supposed to think about all that much. But then again, that can be said for nearly any film involving angels and devils and whatnot. None of that stuff makes any sense to begin with, so why should the movies? What's important here is that "The Prophecy" is a good time - which it is.

And hey, it's a healthy dose of Walken. That's delicious and nutritious!

By seeing this image, your soul is now the property of Christopher Walken.

Man, check out that 90's cheesiness. They don't make trailers like that anymore.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "The Prophecy" is a fun time which makes for an awesome late night quasi-horror flick. The cast is top-notch and the quality of the film-making and special effects are above what one might expect from a movie of this genre. Required viewing for Christopher Walken fans, as I consider it to be one of his most memorable performances.