The Devil Made Them Do It

Notes to filmmakers: So don’t listen to the devil. You’ll end up making crap like The Omen

Ian Grey

You tolerated the bogus piety, extra-Vatican hugger-mugger and general Panavision gloom of the original The Omen because you also knew there was a really cool decapitation or impalement to follow. Alas, the days when a possessed nanny could hurl herself from a mansion top and dedicate her demise to the Antichrist are gone. Now a self-disrespecting apocalypse film can't get by on gore and exotic religiosity alone, without also milking 9/11 for value-added unease.


So before discussing John Moore's lousy remake, there's no way not to talk about 9/11, if only because Moore references it relentlessly and even begins his film with iconic images of the day in a failed attempt to get us in an Armageddon mood even before his evil tiny tot of terror gets all devilish.


So how 9/11'y is Moore's bad film? So much so that, at a recent Manhattan screening and director Q&A, an otherwise regular-looking fellow screamed at the director for using 9/11 to gussy up his "piece of shit movie." Which underlines a basic idea future 9/11 hacks might consider: If you're going to exploit the deaths of 3,000 or so New Yorkers, it might be wiser to crow about it in a city that isn't New York.


Anyway, Moore has other tragedies to co-opt. In the same opening montage of misery that some might deem lacking in subtlety, he also shows us Abu Ghraib torture victims, African famine fatalities and assorted political riots. This is done to initiate his film's basic premise: The world is scary and fucked up. So scary and fucked up, in fact, that the Antichrist can slip onto the proscenium of world events unnoticed. And movies like this will be tolerated to exist.


Like Richard Donner's original, Moore's version offers a Washington power couple—in this case, Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles—who, thanks to the machinations of a cultish Catholic order, apparently double-shifting with their Da Vinci Code duties, end up raising Damien, a.k.a. the Antichrist (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick).


Indications that their bad seed may be, you know, really bad, are ignored. Like when, upon viewing a church where the architecture is a dead ringer for the Trade Center, Damien goes all Tourettes. Or when the newly recruited nanny (Mia Farrow) insists that a rather hound-of-hellish black dog would make the perfect pet for the small boy. Or the mounting death rate among those who cross Damien's path. And so on.


The sole way the new Omen might conceivably work is in its sadistic one-upmanship of the original's fanciful deaths. But aside from some CGI enhancement, Moore's idea of gore innovation is to simply linger on the bloody remains. And since this is a post-Left Behind Armageddon movie in which none of the principal players are born again, we know everybody is doomed, so the only source of suspense is Schreiber's career, which, after his aptly robotic performance as a programmed assassin in Jonathan Demme's Manchurian Candidate remake, is on the precipice of devolving into that of point man of paranoid conspiracy movies. His work here is—how to put it politely?—godawful, an alternating mess of broods and gnashing of teeth.


Nobody fares much better: Fitzpatrick's glowers only prove that Ultimate Evil is sorta cute. Stiles has little to do but suffer prettily. And as a reporter, David Thewlis smokes cigarettes in a fatalistic manner that suggests he's mulling over how steep a fall it's been from his sterling work in Mike Leigh's great Naked to this craven, opportunistic crapshoot.

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