Wow, I didn’t know this was going to be a comedy. John Moore’s remake of the 1976 horror flick The Omen is laughably, hilariously, uproariously bad. It’s so impossible to take seriously you’ll find yourself (when you aren’t bored to tears) giggling and chuckling your way through this unmitigated disaster.
The Omen
1 Star
I believe that any movie that kills off Julia Stiles can’t be all bad but this one certainly tries its darnedest to prove me wrong.
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I must first start off with describing the opening scene of the film where the Pope (Bohumil Svarc) is shown omens coming to pass that lead the church to believe the Anti-Christ is about to be born. The PowerPoint presentation (your groan here) involves images of comets and other signs including real images of the attack on the World Trade Center and the effects of Hurricane Katrina (your disgust here). To call this bad taste doesn’t do the words justice.
The story, for those of you who don’t rember the orginal, involves a young couple Robert Thorn (Liev Schreiber) and his wife Katherine (Julia Styles). The child Katherine gives birth to dies but Robert is approached by a priest who offers to substitute another child in his place. And so young Damien (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick) comes home with the Thorns who begin to rise in the world of politics and power immeadiately.
Then on Damien’s fifth birthday things go crazy and the Thorns start to slowly come to terms with the fact that their son just might be the devil. At first Robert can’t accept the fears of his wife but is convinced by a lunatic priest (Peter Postlewaite) and a tabloid photographer (David Thewlis) who insist he kill his son.
The movie is filled with the aburd including Mia Farrow who plays the nanny from hell Mrs. Blaylock. I can only assume she’s meant to be tempting and menacing but like all the other characters in the film she is neither. In fact no character in this flick is anything but unintentionally funny and impossible to take seriously.
I’ll give you an example of how the film comes up short. At one point the characters come to a river covered in fog and make the way across on a small boat with a single robed figure which is obviously a homage to Caron but its done so cheaply and half-heartedly it sinks, like so much in the film, like a lead stone. The scene isn’t necessary and in fact makes you think of much better films you would rather be watching like Clash of the Titans. It’s rather sad.
The film’s premise is so off the wall that only in the hands of a very good director it still would have been a hard sell, and director John Moore just isn’t up to the task. And so the plot of an evil child that must be killed (in sacrificial manner) before he destroys the world comes off lewd and silly rather than suspenseful or terrifying.
How bad is The Omen? Well if it weren’t for the many unintentional jokes and the death scene of Julia Stiles (which itself is drawn out to such an extent to squeeze out all the joy) it would be unwatchable. However despite its limitations it remains a pretty funny example of how far cinema can go off track and crash in spectacular fashion.