Blog From The Bench

It’s official: The Omen remake is the worst movie I have seen so far this summer. It’s dull, soulless and without a single significant redeeming feature. Anyone with fond memories of the original should steer clear of this turgid excuse for a cash grab. There is nothing hear that you haven’t seen before, heard before, or snickered at before. If you thought the shot-for-shot redux of Psycho was pointless, you ain’t see nothing yet. Frankly there are more problems here than just over familiarity. Thirty years ago, the premise of The Omen seemed fresh, and intriguing. People actually feared the concept of The Devil. Now, with Da Vinci coding up Jesus’ sex life and religion regularly making its way into the worlds of politics and pundits, the arrival of the Antichrist feels like an anticlimactic Fox News Headline. We’ve been told he is coming for 20 plus years. Now that he’s arrived, it’s a lot like the evil Emperor’s new clothes.

As I feared, both Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles are woefully miscast as the well-placed power couple Richard and Katherine Thorne. They are so young looking, as a matter of fact, that the movie has to make several obvious nods to the fact. They toss in nepotism, and a baptism made relationship to the President to argue for the mid 30’s Pappa Thorne as Ambassador to England. Sadly, this is not the sole bit of sloppiness on the part of scribe David Seltzer (he of the original Omen screenplay) and director John Moore. After helming the less than stellar Flight of the Phoenix remake, Moore proves that, as cinematic skills go, he specializes in mundane-en-scene. This is one of the least alive films in recent memory, bereft of even a moment of forward momentum. The narrative takes itself so seriously that it permanently plods along, never achieving a gonzo genre groove. Unlike the Texas Chainsaw and Hills Have Eyes revamps, which explore the movie from the myth backwards, this rote recollection of the first film is just a series of shots leading to a thoroughly predicable finale.

Then there is the horrible hellboy himself, the haughtily named Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick. He looks less like an actual child and more like someone’s idea of what a brat actor playing the Devil’s spawning should be. His dark eyes and Moe bowl haircut can’t hide the fact that this kid can’t act. His entire range of emotion consists of scrunching up his face and attempting to glower. Even when he’s pitching his preposterous hissy as the family pulls up to a cathedral, Moore hides his half-baked histrionics with music video style editing and hand-held hackwork. Thankfully, a couple of the performers acquit themselves. Pete Postlethwaite is so determined in his turn as the about-to-be-skewered Father Brennan that you almost start to care. Almost. Then David Thewlis channels his own inner David Warner, turning soon-to-be-headless photographer Keith Jennings into a near three-dimensional entity. Nearly.

Yet it’s all in service of something done ten times better three decades ago. When Gregory Peck squinted his eyes and looked skeptical, there was power in his presence. Mr. Schreiber is just a wet behind the ears wuss. When Lee Remick died, she got the spectacular send off her long-suffering mother character deserved. Here, Julie Stiles just convulses a little under Mia Farrow’s aged corpse hands (as Ms. Baylock, Farrow is just fair) before simply fading away. Thewlis’s Mediterranean Mohawk has a nice gory gratuity to it, but everything else is sullied and soiled by the overabundance of exposition. Nothing ruins a gag faster, be it in humor or horror, than someone having to explain it to you. But in the case of The Omen, we already knew the tale. The constant repetition and reminders are just onerous overkill.

1 out of 10

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