Bad Omens

Now that all the fuss surrounding Dan Brown's 'The Da Vinci Code' has died down, and copycat books aren't as common, I have deigned to view the movie based upon that most famous work of conspiracy fiction, and was singularly unimpressed.

I'm not mad keen on Tom Hanks at the best of times (sorry, Tom, you spent too long playing the same 'nice guy' roles), but his character in this movie was almost entirely devoid of character (and not Hanks' fault, either) and his involvement in this plot seemed rather contrived. I've heard before that Mr Brown relies far too heavily, far too frequently, on deus ex machina and coincidence, but The Da Vinci Code was his most highly praised work, so I kind of expected better.

I don't doubt that the film is substantially dumbed down (thanks, Hollywood!), and Akiva Goldman's screenplay is not a patch on the work he did on A Beautiful Mind (let's just forget about Batman & Robin), so I suspect it's not as dumbed down as such a complex melange of folklore might otherwise have needed to be, had it been particularly convoluted in the first place.

On the upside, at least its final twist (which I saw coming fairly early on) wasn't centred on a character who only appeared in the last half hour of the film, but so much of the plot was revealed in the trailers, it almost seemed pointless to sit through the rest.

Audrey Tatou put in an excellent performance, though mainly speaking English, so she seemed rather wasted in the role (OK, the character she played was French but were the casting people relying on having a French actor to give the role credibility?)... and, ultimately, this was little more than a convoluted, slacker-free version of the story told in Kevin Smith's Dogma.

That might be a spoiler.

Recently, I watched the second and third films in the original Omen series when all three were shown back to back one evening. I believe I saw all of the first many years ago and, not being massively impressed by it (or the remake, which I turned off part way through!) so I figured I'd skip it this time round.

Damien: Omen 2 (for some reason dropping 'The' from the title) centres on his pre-teen years, specifically his time at a Military academy... and, aside from glaring people to death, Damien Thorn doesn't really do a great deal. Much (fatal) misfortune befalls anyone working within the Thorn empire who doesn't follow the 'global domination' angle, and it's made clear to young Damien that, as his nanny says in the first film, it's all for him. Ultimately, though, it's one of those films where you could look at some of the deaths and see horribly complex chains of coincidence rather than any direct, malign influence. Sure, that's just as unbelievable but, if a couple of train engineers leave their vehicle unattended and didn't put the brakes on properly, it's not inconceivable that it'll start rolling again. What is inconceivable is that (a) anyone standing in its path would fail to move out of the way and (b) no-one else in the train yard noticed that there was a runaway train on the same tracks as some unattended rolling stock that was still carrying cargo. To be honest, it didn't really stand on its own as a movie... proving that the concept of a trilogy where the middle part is just filler is not a new one.

The third film, The Final Conflict, does slightly better... but ends up just coming across as a desperate attempt to prove that Evil will never succeed, despite the rather compelling evidence to the contrary presented by the first two films. Sure, Damien gets his way for most of the film, and actually succeeds in bumping off an entire cabal of monks before even one of them can stab him with their suspiciously nail-like daggers. Sure, he has creepy conversations with a statue of Jesus, and there's a 'clever' bit (in the sense that I'm sure the film-makers were terribly pleased with themselves) where it appears that the statue is crying blood (because Thorn cut his hands gripping the crown of thorns). Sure, there's the bit where it appears that he somehow has the world at his feet thanks to the power of a disco ball in a cave... But he ends up getting done in in the most random fashion, by a woman he'd essentially conquered only a few scenes before. It is strongly implied that the Christ child must have been slain (among the hundreds of other babies killed throughout the film) and yet one character explains that, somehow, that one baby is safe and away from danger.

And then to have a vision of Christ to appear in a broken-out window as the resolution of the film just seemed cheap.

I did start to think that, in theory, there could have been a follow-up, because Damien may well have impregnated the woman who eventually kills him... but then I realised that his physical conquest of her was by means of anal sex, so that put an end to my speculation.

Of course, it turns out there was an 'Omen 4', made for Television... It seems to be about Delia, an adopted girl with psychic powers who - lo and behold - turns out to be the biological daughter of Damien Thorn. No mention is made of the biological mother, but one can easily believe that Mr Thorn was happily sowing his satanic oats for years. A few moments with Google reveals that Delia's mother was intended to be the woman who killed Damien but, for unspecified reasons, "this was dropped from the final film."

Weird...