On a Scale of 1 to 1000, It Gets About a 666

I went out to see the new version of The Omen this week.

As odd as it may sound, despite my enjoyment of this type of movie, I've never seen the original version. It's on my list of "movies to get around to some day," but not checked off yet. So I wasn't coming to this new version with any direct comparisons to be made.

But as it turns out, I was coming with a lot of knowledge about what was going to happen in the movie. The story of The Omen is pretty far in the cultural mainstream, I think. It's not "Rosebud's a sled" or "there's no place like home" known, but everybody is pretty aware of Damien as the anti-Christ and the 666 birthmark, and possibly (depending on your enthusiasm for horror/thriller movies) a good deal of the plot.

What little you may not have known is spelled out for you in detail rather early on in the movie. A "Crazy Wacko" approaches the father and tells him, "if you don't take action, X will happen, then Y will happen, and finally Z will happen." And wouldn't ya know -- X, Y, and Z ensues.

In short, I felt like I had seen this movie before. And this was its critical flaw. Because the truth is, I can't point to much else that was "bad" about it. The acting was fine. The story, if you could get around the predictability of it, was entertaining. Some of the imagery was a little too "on the nose" (we get it already -- red is the color of the devil!), but hey, at least it had a motif like that. I could have wished for a few more suspenseful scares and a few less "cheap music sting" scares, but there were some of both. Still, not enough good to counteract the phenomenal sense of deja vu. I give it a C+.

A few footnotes about the cast:

Liev Schreiber could really be carving out a name for himself as the go-to guy for remakes of classic films. First, The Manchurian Candidate. Now this. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or bad thing. On the one hand, Hollywood is making so many remakes these days that they'd be a pretty steady source of work. On the other hand, the prestige of appearing in such movies isn't all that great.

How great is Julia Stiles' agent? Or, perhaps, how bad is Liev Schreiber's agent? Somehow, she got top billing over him in his movie. Did all those "teen interpretations of Shakespeare" films she made really give her that much clout? Because in my mind, these two are roughly about equal in the "acting pool" -- somewhere in the "B-List." (Can't really "open" a movie, as they say, but is certainly a name and/or face most people would recognize.) Based off the size of their two roles in this movie, I would have thought he'd be top billed, easy.