A marketer’s dream, The Omen is buoyed by (I guess that wouldn’t necessarily be “blessed with”) the novel opening date of June 6, 2006 — numerical shorthand which steadfastly announces its intentions to tap into the burgeoning tide of vaguely menacing religiosity that’s fashionable in an anxiety-laden culture driven by the engines of terror, war and natural disaster. A retelling of director Richard Donner’s 1976 chiller about the spawn of the Devil, the horror flick is an earnest, decorous and occasionally jolting rendering of the material, an entirely serviceable piece of pop entertainment that will play best to those who haven’t seen or heard much about the original.



Liev Schreiber (who also did remake duty in The Manchurian Candidate) stars as Robert Thorn, a young, well-heeled governmental attaché, and the godson of the President of the United States. After the stillborn death of their infant, Robert accepts another child without telling his wife Kathryn (Julia Stiles), and they lovingly raise Damien (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick) as their son, with Robert of course closely guarding this aforementioned secret. It’s not long before Robert is elevated to the post of Ambassador to Great Britain when his boss dies in a freak accident.

Years later, Robert and Kathryn’s happy lives begin to take a turn for the worse when Damien’s nanny hangs herself in front of a crowd at his sixth birthday party. Father Brennan (Pete Postlethwaite), a mysterious but traumatized priest, shows up and forecasts more horrible things for Kathryn, Robert and others; Damien, he says, is the Antichrist, the human spawn of Satan. Increasingly disconnected from and frightened by her son, Kathryn slips into a depression. These events coincide with the Thorns’ hiring of a new nanny, Mrs. Baylock (Mia Farrow), as well as the realization by photographer Keith Jennings (David Thewlis) that distorted photos he’s taken may serve as indicators of deaths both previous and impending.

As directed by John Moore (Behind Enemy Lines, The Flight of the Phoenix) and updated by David Seltzer, the writer of the original film, The Omen delivers a few effective blows of menace, but ultimately leans too heavily on the theoretical injection of viewers’ own beliefs and end-time apprehension to supply its dread. This is evident in everything from the absurdly baroque touches that stud threatening montages which are completely emotionally unconnected to the narrative to a third act steeplechase that only bothers to sketch out the barest details of a conspiracy that birthed Damien and brought him to Robert and Kathryn’s care. In recreating two of the big five set pieces, retaining the primeval nature of other deaths and fetishistically replicating its source material’s meticulous production design, the movie most heartily evidences a desire to be “all evil to all people.”

The original Omen presented Damien as a sullen, neatly coiffed, little brunette kid — the smallest member of the AC/DC dress-alike fan club — and this movie duplicates that sedated character bit. Yet if, as the film suggests, all that we see here is part of the Devil’s sly campaign of ascendancy — prologue to an apocalyptic showdown on Earth — wouldn’t it be more chilling to contrast such murders and death with a (somewhat more) charming countenance? The power of the Devil, after all, lies in charismatic appeals to vanity, or at least an ability to lie low and dormant (e.g., the phrase, “like a snake in the grass”) until proper opportunity. Given the circumstances of mortal dispatch on display in The Omen, there’s no persuasive reason to believe a sympathetic yet secretly malevolent figure could emerge. With a remote stare, malevolent pout and about eight lines of dialogue in the entire movie, Davey-Fitzpatrick’s Damien is a cipher for immoral wickedness — evil as muted petulance.

Stylish yet mannered, The Omen is a blank canvas that draws its anxiety from viewers’ own sense of impending moral peril. A few good jolts are meted out, and if one allows their mind to wander and indulge the narrative possibilities the story flirts with, it’s certainly easy to muster some disconcertment. Mostly, though, the film’s solemn creepiness is hermetically sealed off from its more direct, goosing passages, proving that evil can be just as boring as saintliness. (20th Century Fox, R, 106 mins.)