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Overall Rating
 Awesome: 9.4%
Worth A Look: 11.11%
Average: 8.55%
Pretty Bad: 21.37%
Total Crap: 49.57%
11 reviews, 51 user ratings
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| Omen, The (2006) |
by Doug Bentin
"Dogs and cats living together. Real wrath-of-God type stuff."
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In spite of a bland, heart-isn’t-in-it performance from Julia Stiles as a mom who thinks her child is evil and wants to kill her, “The Omen” works surprisingly well. I guess she was born without that specific gothic melodrama gene that’s necessary to see you through pictures like this one. It really helps to have it even if you’re just going to watch these flicks.Stiles is Katherine Thorn, wife of Robert (Liev Schreiber, doing a nice job building up to his climactic breakdown), who is the U.S. president’s godson and a riser in the ranks of the diplomatic corp. Their first born dies on the delivery table but a priest asks Robert to raise another newborn as his own. This infant’s mother died in delivery and he has no family. Cue the sinister music. Thorne agrees and he and his unsuspecting wife take baby Damien home.
Five years later all Hell doesn’t quite break out but it sure starts straining at the seams. Damien’s nanny hangs herself in front of a birthday gathering. Another nervous priest (Pete Postlewaite) tells Thorne that Damien is the son of Satan and that his real mother is buried under an ugly pyramid thingy in Paris. Wait—I’m thinking of another movie.
Then a new nanny sort of insinuates herself into the household. It’s Mia Farrow, who pulls about the same stuff on the Thornes she used to pull on Woody Allen. Thorne starts working with a photographer who convinces him that something wicked is this way coming, and that they must destroy Damien because he is the Antichrist. Katherine begins to suspect something like that, too, but so will many of you mothers before school starts up again if you have to stay home with your kids every day
Director John Moore (“Flight of the Phoenix”) and screenwriter David Seltzer (who wrote the 1976 original version of the film as well) do a more than creditable job of piling one odd occurrence on top of another to lead us down the garden path. The film contains four solid jump moments, the last one of which elicited a group gasp, even from the seven thoughtless ones in my audience who had been checking their cell phones every ten minutes since the movie started. Guys, those lights shine in the eyes of the people sitting behind you. Just thought I’d mention it.
The assorted priests and such are played by the kind of Brit character actors—David Thewlis and Michael Gambon among them—who may not love this kind of creepshow but are professional enough to take acting in it seriously, and newcomer Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick, as Damien, is one creepy-looking kid. If you had a portrait of your son painted by Edward Gorey, it would look like this.“The Omen,” like “The DaVinci Code,” draws on the standard mechanisms of the classic gothic romance—thunderstorms, the dark side of Catholicism, cemeteries in the moonlight, etc.—but “Omen” is the superior film. It’s the scariest horror movie so far this year.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=14687&reviewer=405
originally posted: 06/20/06 03:43:38
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USA
06-Jun-2006 (R)
DVD: 17-Oct-2006
UK
06-Jun-2006
Australia
06-Jun-2006
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