I saw the original “The Omen,” the one with Gregory Peck, sometime in college. The only things I remembered about the film involved a suicidal nanny and a nasty car wreck. I remember liking the movie and getting the creeps, but I wasn’t offended when word of a remake came about and when I found out it was coming out on June 6, 2006 (666, get it?), well I just had to go and cover this film, didn’t I?

The story involves the birth of the anti-christ, little Damien. Robert Thorn, a man who works for the U.S. Embassy in Italy finds out that his wife had complications in labor and that they lost their son. A priest tells him that a woman died in childbirth around the same time and that her son survived. He asks Thorn to raise this boy as his own and nobody has to know. Everything is fine and dandy for the first few years, but at Damien’s fifth birthday party a nanny commits suicide and all hell breaks loose.

Ah, I kill me.

Soon, lots of strange things start happening (kids won’t play with Damien and gorillas try to break out of their cages at the zoo when he is around) and Thorn’s wife, Katherine, begins to suspect something is wrong with the boy. She even suspects that Damien means to do her harm.

When Katherine ends up in the hospital, Thorn leaves Damien with a nanny and begins to search for answers into who Damien really is. This is when the film bogs down and gets a little boring - or should I say, a little more boring. While there were a few creepy images and a few scares from people or animals jumping out of nowhere, the film, a movie about the anti-christ that was released on 6/6/06, mind you, wasn’t all that scary.

Still, it looked pretty and the acting was o.k. Actually, the suppoting cast completely outshined Liev Schreiber and Julia Stiles as the Thorns. Mia Farrow was great as Damien’s over-protective nanny, Mrs. Baylock, and appearances from David Thewlis, Pete Postlethwaite and Michael Gambon helped to elevate the film. Schreiber and Stiles were adequate, but they could have done more as the unwitting parents to the son of Satan.

As for little Damien, yeah, he looks creepy, but all he did was pout. I didn’t get a real sense of menace from him for much of the film.

“The Omen” isn’t a bad movie. Much like “The Da Vinci Code,” this film takes a familiar plot, so familiar to viewers that it lacks any real sense of suspense, and then doesn’t give the viewer anything new to bring energy to the film. Whether the fault lies in the staid performances of the leads, the screenplay or the direction, “The Omen” isn’t a film that anyone needs to rush right out and see.

**1/2

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