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THE OMEN (2006)
"It's all for you, Damien!" Yeah, thanks, Damien. If ever a movie defied all reason to exist, surely this is that movie. I know why studios remake movies - because remakes come with built-in reputations, and you can't buy publicity like that. And I know why filmmakers make them - because they jump at the chance to put their own stamp on their favorites. Omen '06 has no such stamp from director John Moore. Like Gus Van Sant's similarly inexplicable Psycho '98, this is a remake in the truest sense of the word, because they made the same damn movie again. Why? Because of the June 6, 2006 thing? Doesn't exactly escape from our breath with the hushed infamy of a 9/11, does it? Now that it's come and gone and nothing of note happened - even Slayer and Deicide couldn't finish their albums in time - will the guys at Fox wonder whether sinking $60M in this movie was a good idea? Okay, there are a few things which differ from the original, aside from the obvious (a much younger cast, natch). It opens with a throng of high Catholic officials trying to convince an ailing Pope that Armageddon is at hand, and we next see the incident that gets Ambassador Robert Thorne (here, Liev Schreiber) his job. The "impaling" death is a little more ornate (lots of falling stained glass), and the "beheading" death is actually a lot quicker and less spectacular. Some effort is made toward explaining that lame, lame poem that was supposedly from the Bible (and rhymes in English), though it still adds up to the same thing that drove so many plot twists in The Da Vinci Code: any hack can think of metaphorical interpretations of his own shitty poetry. That hack would be David Seltzer, who has added a few elaborations to his original script but has curiously elected not to jazz it up, but to...well, whatever the opposite of that is. Country it down. For example, the wacky inspiration of a car under siege from crazed baboons (in London!) has been neutered into gorillas behind glass in a standard zoo enclosure. Except for a few flash-cut bits of nightmare imagery - some of which work (a priest's disposal of a bloody baby), some of which don't (goat's skull in a red robe) - The Omen '06 is if anything, the most stolid and lifeless Omen movie yet. Except for the look into that annoying poem's origins, the plot still falters in the same places the original did. It's still not clear what the story is with the panicky priest (here played by Pete Postlethwaite) with his own 666 birthmark, and I still don't know why the Catholic church is sending only their fruitcakiest members to try to stave off Armageddon, or even if said fruitcakes are working on the church's behalf, or why it took five years for two priests to reach the inevitable conclusion about a human child coming out of a non-human mother. And a set of magic daggers are still the only things that can defeat Damien, though I find it hard to believe that in this day and age even an ambassador would be able to put them in his carry-on luggage. Schreiber's okay, even if he seems like a bit of a crybaby. Julia Stiles as his wife though - sorry, I wanted to whack that rich twat with a shovel. If you're able-bodied, able-minded, have no employment to drain at your time and your only responsibility in life is looking after one - ONE! - kid, who's old enough for kindergarten, and you think you need a full-time nanny, you madam have too much money, and need a good hard whack with a shovel. Of the cast, only David Thewlis in the David Warner photographer role (you just know this guy's been to a few Iron Maiden concerts) and Mia Farrow as the demonically cheerful nanny really acquit themselves. I really have no idea how the original Omen has managed to retain a reputation of being a supposedly serious, truly chilling horror film, but it sure came at a great time; the peak of "Satanic panic", alongside that ever-present cold war feeling that maybe the end of the world wasn't that far off. Nowadays, despite a few loudmouth groups insisting that we are in the "end times" and the handful of people who still take seriously Geraldo's claim that there was a secret network of a million Satanists at work in America, the whole apocolyptophilia thing seems to have tapered off (does anybody still read those Left Behind books?), and most people are smart enough to see just how facile that "greatest trick the devil ever pulled" cliché is. We've already got terrorists and hurricanes to worry about; how can an Antichrist compete with that? (c) Brian J. Wright 2006 BACK TO THE O's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |