On any list of unnecessary remakes, The Omen – that cheesy 1976 horror goof designed to shamelessly piggyback on the success of The Exorcist – has to be somewhere relatively close to the top. And yet here’s John Moore’s faithful retry anyway, simply confirming its pointlessness at every available turn. Slavishly adhering to its source material’s narrative particulars, the film recounts the many troubles inflicted upon U.S. ambassador Robert Thorn (Liev Schreiber) and wife Katherine (Julia Stiles) by their surreptitiously switched-at-birth son Damien (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), who isn’t an innocent tyke but, rather, the evil minion-courting, 666 birthmark-boasting Son of Satan. Moore gussies up his familiar story with unscary, jaggedly edited nightmare sequences involving people wearing animal masks in stark white bathrooms, while the sight of numerous American flags and the burning WTC towers (it’s, believe it or not, one of the signs of the apocalypse) strive to provide political subtext to the ridiculous supernatural proceedings. One could reasonably argue that, in the context of this blatantly silly and flippant genre endeavor, invoking 9/11 is not only inane but also insulting. But then, to be insulted, you’d first have to take this needless Omen do-over seriously – a task that’s next to impossible.
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