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Back Shelf Beauties
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The Omen I keep hearing from movie fans how they are sick and tired of remakes of movies they loved and enjoyed the first time around. After seeing it, I think The Omen might be the remake that pushes them over the edge, and not because they are possessed by the devil. The original was a classic horror movie released in 1976 starring the legendary Gregory Peck, which you should rent on DVD if you want to see a good version of the story. This version might be one of the worst movies of the year, and that's saying a lot in the year of Sharon Stone's Basic Instinct 2. Liev Schreiber stars as Robert Thorn - a U.S. diplomat in Italy whose wife, Katherine (Julia Stiles), goes through a very difficult and complicated birth of their son. Sadly, the baby dies during labor, and Katherine can no longer have children due to the complications. A priest at the hospital, Father Spiletto (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) breaks the information to Robert, but also offers an alternative. He tells the man a young boy born at the hospital at about the same time lost his mother during her labor, and this might be a sign from God that Robert and Katherine should take the boy and raise him as their own. Everything seems fine for the next five years, until strange occurrences start to happen whenever baby Damien is around. As people die, animals freak out and Katherine starts to believe Damien is trying to kill her, Robert realizes that boy ain't right. Why is Damien so powerful and seemingly evil? Where did this young boy come from? Will he succeed in killing his mother?
The Omen is a horrible movie with a great release date. I think the release date of 6-6-06 is all the movie has going for it as everything from story to mood to directing to acting stinks, and not just stinks a little, but stinks at all time highs (or would that be lows?). It's one of those movies that has you wondering why they made this piece of junk. I think I laughed more at The Omen than I did at The Wedding Crashers, and I liked The Wedding Crashers. Director John Moore is trying too hard to get under our skin and creep us out, to the point where you realize it, know you could never be creeped out by such pitiful material, and start to laugh at the ponderous attempts to shock us that feel like they are pulled straight from a bad Saturday Night Live parody (Saturday Night Live circa Jimmy Fallon, not the classic funny eras with Belushi, Murphy, Carvey or Sandler). The music is too heavy and does not impose the feeling of doom in you that it should. Some action is slowed down too much to highlight its importance, but anyone with half a brain will get the importance without the histrionics. The general grainy look of the film, up to the supposedly ominous clouds in the background and morosely dark lighting which is supposed to invoke some sort of feeling of dread (a feeling you only have after you realize you wasted the night and $9 on a ticket), also seems overboard and silly. However, nothing can top the awkward, unintentionally hilarious and career ending performance of Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick as Damien. Little Seamus is unwatchable in The Omen. He's just a kid, so you can't blame him, and I don't want to pile on too much. You have to blame Moore. Directors must work with child actors to get the best possible performance, like Spielberg was able to get from all of the kids in E.T. or M. Night Shyamalan was able to coax out of Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense. However, Moore makes his biggest mistake by not getting Seamus to act innocently at any time. While we all know what is supposed to happen before you even buy a ticket, there are moments when Seamus must give us the impression that he is a young child who is angelically nice and sweet, so Damien's moments of evil seem all the more shocking. The audience is willing to go along with it and enjoy his faux attempts at sweet if it is done well. We'd revel in moments where something horrible happens, then have Moore pan over to Damien looking as if he is nicely enjoying a ride on the carousel with a look of contentment and innocence on his face. However, Seamus stomps around the movie and acts very weird instead of imposing. In an attempt to make Damien into a frightening character, the kid pouts as if he was told he can't have some ice cream, instead of raging like the Anti-Christ. Moore seems to think having a bowl haircut straight from The Three Stooges (the kid got stuck with a Moe) and piercing blue eyes is enough to shock us, but it just makes the kid look like a dunce with a bad haircut. Making it all worse, writer David Seltzer (who also wrote the original, so he should know better) puts together a script that goes from campy to stupid to boring. We laugh at the devilish symbolism and repetition of the 666 motif in every action (which is kind of entertaining if Moore decided to go this route throughout the whole movie), but it gets stupid from there. Robert becomes an ambassador who can just disappear off to foreign countries at a moment's notice. Another character suddenly becomes Sherlock Holmes for no good reason. Then, it gets boring as Robert tries to dig into the background of Damien to determine if the baby is evil or not, which takes us on a meaningless chase, since we already know how it will end and Seltzer doesn't throw us any surprises to keep our interest. Worst of all, Seltzer never explains why Damien can impose his will on just about every single character in the movie, but never has that power over his parents. Did Moore leave this out? Was Damien just afraid of getting a Time Out or sent to his room without dessert? Did they use The Force or some other Jedi mind trick? The Omen must have been made by the devil himself, so we would never take him seriously if he shows up on earth in the body of a 5-year old child - a brilliant tactical move in the battle of good versus evil, but not a brilliant movie. -1 Waffles (Out Of 4) Copyright 2006 - WaffleMovies.com
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