The Omen

Did Hollywood learn nothing from the infamous 1998 remake of Psycho with Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche? If you'll recall, that was a movie that tried to do a shot for shot remake of the original horror masterpiece. Needless to say, the movie turned out to be just as pointless as it sounds. The new remake of The Omen is not quite that bad, but it still serves no purpose for existing, other than to cash in on its gimmicky release date of 06/06/06. Director John Moore stays slavishly faithful to the original movie, even going so far as to hire the original screenwriter, David Seltzer, who changes little in his script other than modernizing it and adding a few modern day ominous references such as September 11th. From dialogue and even the camera angles in some scenes, it's pretty much the same thing audiences watched 30 years ago. Which of course begs the question why bother in the first place, as all this new version has to offer is talented actors giving wooden line readings, making the film a lethargic chore to sit through.

Rising politician Robert Thorn (Liev Schreiber) is forced to make a difficult decision when his young wife Katherine (Julia Stiles) gives birth to a baby born dead as the film opens. A shady priest at the hospital offers a suggestion - Take ownership of a different baby who was born in the same hospital and has lost its family. Since Katherine has never seen the child, she will never know the difference. They take the little tyke home and name him Damien (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick). The child seems normal and healthy during his early years, perhaps a bit too much so, as Katherine ominously states at one point Damien never seems to get ill, which she finds unusual. As the child reaches the age of five, strange occurrences begin popping up. Damien's nanny hangs herself in front of the guests during the boy's grand birthday party, mysterious growling dogs appear out of nowhere, seemingly keeping watch over the kid, and Katherine begins to be haunted by terrifying visions that hint that Damien is not what he seems to be.

Robert has a series of run-ins with a frantic priest (Pete Postlethwaite) who tries to warn him that Damien is evil and that time is running out. Robert quite stubbornly chooses to ignore the fact that his wife is scared of her own child and other ominous signs until Katherine winds up hospitalized, and the priest who's been trying to warn him all this time winds up dead in a bizarre accident. It is only then that he begins to dig into the mystery with the help of a photographer who's been following him (David Thewlis), and eventually uncovers the truth that little Damien is the son of Satan.

Anyone who has seen The Omen during its countless showings on TV or on video will know exactly what to expect. In fact, the movie almost plays out like a high school production of the original. All the pieces and all the elements are there, but they don't come together in quite the way that made the original a classic to some people. The movie is clumsy, dull, and just plain overlong. The fact that the filmmakers make no effort whatsoever to try anything new makes me question the movie's very reason for even being filmed in the first place. Wouldn't it have been cheaper and smarter if Fox had just rereleased the original if they wanted to cash in on the date? And when the movie does try something different, it winds up falling on its face, because the original did it better. Remember that scene where the monkeys started attacking the car that Damien was inside while it was driving through a safari-like zoo attraction? Well, this time, all we get are a bunch of scared tiny monkeys cowering behind trees, and a guy in a gorilla costume throwing its body against the surface of its cage. It just doesn't really have the same effect, and it's surprising that out of all the scenes in the movie they could have done differently, they chose to fumble one of the more memorable moments.

Especially when there's so much that could have been done to make this movie better than the original. But no, all the things that annoyed me the first time around come back to haunt me. Particularly the fact that Robert Thorn is one of the most stubborn and clueless heroes to ever grace a horror film, especially in this version. It's impossible to root for this guy, because he's so narrow minded that he can't even see that his kid is truly evil until there's only about five minutes left in the film. He sees all the ominous signs, he sees everyone who tries to warn him get murdered in gruesome ways, and he still keeps on insisting that there's nothing wrong. Let me ask you a question, if you were attending an opera, and a priest came up to you during intermission, and told you that your wife was in grave danger, and that you must meet with him tomorrow before he walked away, would you chase after him and ask him what he meant by what he said, or would you just stand there and go back to watching the opera as Robert does in this film? You'd think that the guy would be at least a little bit concerned, especially when his wife starts complaining of nightmarish visions, and pleading with him to not let their son kill her, but Robert appears unnerved and unmoved in scene after scene.

A lot of this may have to do with the fact that The Omen is comprised of a large cast of talented stars who apparently were under strict orders by the director to show as little emotion as possible. Liev Schreiber in particular gives a completely stiff and robotic performance that makes me wonder if I wasn't watching a performance by a pod person disguised as Schreiber. It doesn't matter what's going on in a scene, he keeps that same stone face expression, and reads his dialogue as if he were reading off a grocery list. This makes his character even more laughable as he seems to react to people around him dying with such casual disinterest. It is not until his last couple scenes that his voice rises above a monotone. Julia Stiles at least puts some emotion in her performance, but she is vastly underwritten, and pretty much forced to stand there and react to her spooky kid in every scene. Of the performances, only Mia Farrow stands out as Mrs. Baylock, Damien's new nanny after the first kills herself. She's at least able to put a different spin on the character from the original, but her overly friendly performance seems to make her all the more suspicious almost from the second she walks into the frame.

Of course, what would The Omen be without Damien? Young Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick certainly has glaring evilly down to an art, and that's good, because that's all he's required to do. He just sits and glares at everyone, even when he's supposed to be happy, that you're not exactly surprised that he turns out to be the AntiChrist. He has maybe three or four lines of dialogue total in the entire film, and seems to disappear for a vast majority of it as his father goes seeking out a disfigured priest who looks like a cross between The Emperor from Star Wars and The Phantom of the Opera. The kid's required to do nothing but glare in every scene he's in that it becomes hard to take him seriously. I especially love the sequence where little Damien gives his mother the evil eye the entire time he's making a peanut butter sandwich for himself. His performance becomes a self-parody before long, and anyone who is even frightened by him should probably swear off horror movies for life, 'cause villains don't get any less frightening than this, folks.

The Omen is a shallow, junky, worthless excuse of a remake that simply never should have been given the green light. It improves upon the original in no way, and quite frankly, it manages to find ways to make things even worse. The movie is a lifeless deadweight piece of horror that does can't even manage to produce a single solitary thrill, so it instead tries to startle us with loud noises on the soundtrack every so often so we don't fall asleep. This movie is a work of evil all right, but I don't think the Devil is to blame here. I personally blame the greedy Fox executives who saw a chance to exploit audiences out of their hard-earned money. If you've seen the original, stay home and rent it. And if you haven't seen it, stay home and rent it. Anyway you put it, The Omen is plain pathetic in just about every way.

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