rated R

When is a remake not a remake? Apart from some new actors and a more vibrant visual sense, there’s not much difference between the original version of “The Omen” and this new, unnecessary update. It’s unfortunate—the 1976 horror flick was never more than average, its only real claim to fame being a creepy-looking kid who subtly caused some people to die.

Granted, it was a nice-looking, well-put together film (with Gregory Peck in the lead, no less), but it was neither scary nor groundbreaking, unlike “The Exorcist,” which preceded it by three years.

With that sort of middling foundation, this new take on Satan’s son could only go up, right? Wrong. “The Omen” gets a fresh coat of paint and a couple contemporary references (9/11, Iraq, the Columbia space shuttle, etc.), but still stands firmly in the realm of mediocrity.

Who’s to blame? Screenwriter David Seltzer, who also wrote the original film. It must have been an easy job—the differences between the two films are minute at best, and token references to current events do not constitute a remake. The only thing Seltzer managed to improve upon was an already awesome decapitation sequence found in the original. 

What the newest version does is underscore just how weak the original was. The plot is fairly one-note: Robert Thorn (Liev Schreiber) and his wife, Katherine (Julia Stiles), are the unwitting parents of the Antichrist, their son Damien (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick). The little devil boy exerts his malevolent influence on those around him while his dad, who serves as the ambassador to Great Britain, tries to make sense of why his son is so weird. The momentum of the film comes from trying to get all the characters from one plot-point to the next.

It’s hard to fault director John Moore, who gives “The Omen” a slick, polished look. Moore gets some great shots in the film—the scene in which Damien knocks his mom off a balcony is tight and suspenseful and looks perfectly composed. And a strict color scheme—white for innocent victims, red for Satanic villains and black for those in-between—gives “The Omen” a welcome visual flair.

Likewise, the cast also does well with what they’ve got, which, admittedly, isn’t much. As Robert Thorn, Liev Schreiber is a nonentity for the first half of the film, stoically disbelieving that anything is wrong with his son. But by the second half, Thorn finally starts to see that his son, in fact, may be the Antichrist, and so drifts between wanting to kill the child and wanting to protect him from any future harm. Schreiber owns the final 20 minutes of the film, but it’s too little, too late. Meanwhile, Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick, the little lad who portrays Damien, is sufficiently creepy looking, which is all that’s required of the Devil’s son, apparently.

As for Julia Stiles, well, her character is pretty lame, too. Katherine goes from doting to unhinged to incapacitated in the span of an hour, yet doesn’t add much to the movie beyond that. In an inspired bit of stunt-casting, Mia “Rosemary’s Baby” Farrow plays Miss Baylock, an evil nanny sent by the Devil to watch over Damien. Farrow clearly has a lot of fun with her role, glaring and cackling madly. Subtlety, it seems, was not on the curriculum in Satanic finishing school. But her enthusiasm is out of place in a film that’s too somber and serious for its own good.