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John Moore's The Omen

by The Bridge
06/07/2006

"Happy Disembowelment Day!"
sent 10:47:06
06.06.2006

"? Is it Memorial Day or something?"
sent 10:49:32
06.06.2006

"6/6/6"
sent 10:49:54
06.06.2006

Which goes to show you two things: 1. I have a lamentably lackluster grasp of history (it's not even close to Memorial Day), and 2. I am not in tune with my inner Satan. I had even asked off work on this momentous day in order to go see John Moore's remake of The Omen on opening day, yet the spooky-ooky significance of the date had escaped me. To atone for this, and to get into the spirit of things, I drew some inverted crosses on the soles of my boots and played a bit of devil's music before heading to the theater. Well, I tried to. The most devilish things I could find were some old Guns 'n Roses and bootlegs of Tori Amos cussing. Does that count?

It seems that John Moore may have had a similar problem. While the new Omen certainly can't be accused of getting too newfangled - much of the movies pacing, plot, and scene structure are quite faithful to the original - it just doesn't feel that evil. For one thing, the spawn himself, Damien - played here by one Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick - inspired more titters in the packed theater than any cute movie-munchkin in recent memory. You could just imagine Moore's direction for the little scamp: "Now in this scene you're mad at Mommy! Really, really mad! Like she ate all the cookies and didn't even offer you one!"

Every time the kid turned to glower in what one could only assume was supposed to be a menacing manner, the audience - myself included - chuckled lovingly. The growing terror felt by Katherine and Robert Thorn (Julia stiles and Liev Schreiber, respectively) is hard to empathize with, as both the demon child and the eerie setting are none too scary. Katherine's progressive nightmares, featuring her tike pouting demonstratively whilst touting tools of suicide, look almost laughable, like a series of SNL sketches. And there's a lot of sophomoric shorthand here; for instance, Moore splashes every "foreboding" scene with liberal amounts of blood red, lest we forget that the Devil's afoot.

Cheers, however, to Mia Farrow, whose only failing as the nasty nanny is that she ought to chew the scenery a bit more. Something about her wicked fey beauty really sells the whole "Satan's servant angle." Her presence is one of the few things in this movie that feels genuinely unsettling.

I saw this flick with a coupla fellows who are far more devoted to horror movies than I, and hence recalled the original with greater clarity, so I'm gonna cheap out and use their comments to flesh out this review. "Well, the first one had better music," one of my pals points out. "More operatic, chorale-chanting 'Son of a jackal! Son of a jackal!!' type stuff." There's an Act II decapitation which is "worth the price of admission alone," according to my other friend, a diehard gore-fan. "But they shoulda made the fight scene with Mia Farrow longer," he says. "That scene with her in the car's headlights, with all the blood on her mouth? That looked great. They needed more of that." It was one of the more riveting scenes.

While the movie never descended into the too-talkie boorishness that sunk recent "thriller" The Da Vinci Code (a movie so dull I couldnt even bring myself to write about it), it seemed to spend most of its time building up to nothing. It was kind of like watching a substandard production of "Romeo and Juliet": you already know what's gonna happen. The cast and crew's job is to sell you the suspense by making you forget what you know, and this retelling is too doggedly reliable to ever do that.