And lo, on the sixth day of the sixth month in the sixth year of the millennium, the sixth horn will sound and marketing executives will be released from the sixth circle of Hell in order to orgasm at the confluence of numbers. If they do not carry the Mark of the Beast, they surely at least have his number on their cellphones.

Better yet, they had Richard Donner's film The Omen in their catalogue, a cheesy yet sometimes dignified horror film that put the mark of the beast in the public consciousness. So naturally, they remade it, placing it in the hands of a decent but not particularly imaginative director, John Moore.

To seal the deal, they even got the screenwriter from the original, David Seltzer, to lazily update his script by…um, perhaps he changed some of it by adding in cell phones, which most surely are tools of Satan. Especially when they ring in a movie theater.

What they didn't do was come up with any particular reason to remake the film, other than that killer release date. Moore gives us less by maintaining Donner's original pacing and major story beats. What he cannot give us, apparently, is anything resembling suspense, adding in gore to distract us.

Because of the pacing, the characters that run afoul of little Damien (Seamus Davy-Fitzpatrick) have their fates telegraphed, often indeed signing for the delivery. The only thing lazier than Seltzer's script, apparently, is the Devil himself..

Instead, Moore throws in a few dream sequence "gotchas." This means that the only scares come from quick jump cut images of Damien in a hockey mask, a zombie mask and a cameo by Al Gore talking about inconvenient truths. There's no creeping sense of dread, only frustration that despite all the evidence and people hurriedly explaining the truth over and over to Robert Thorn (Liev Schreiber), the ambassador refuses to believe that his son is the Spawn of Satan.

At least his wife Katherine (Julia Stiles) keys in early, even though she has no access to any of the truth. After noticing that Damien is eerily unemotional (though no more so than Schreiber or Stiles themselves), she declares him evil, especially when he won't stop playing videogames when she asks him to.

This remake seems so doggedly (make that Helldoggedly) determined to follow the original's template that it squanders the few opportunities it has for something new. In a five-year post-partum depression, Katherine goes to see a psychiatrist, who may or may not be part of the conspiracy of evil around the Thorns. Nor does it occur to an allegedly increasingly paranoid Robert to even wonder.

These people don't even use the internet, which would be rife with information right and wrong about the Apocalypse. No crackpot theories get offered up, just sincere interpretation of a poem that Robert hears once from a doomed priest (Pete Postlethwaite) and manages to commit to memory. Maybe he read the movie poster.

Moore starts the film off with a little diversion, as a Vatican Council lays out how all the signs of Revelation have been fulfilled. Apparently, though, the Catholic Church has taken an unofficial policy of just letting Satan take over the world, because they sure don't do anything during this film.

Forget The Da Vinci Code, Catholics should be up in arms over this film. Insteady, they just disappear, bemoaning the coming of the Beast off-camera until Moore can dabble in a pathetic bit of symbolism involving the color red. Not that the symbolism actually means anything particularly deep; it's just that, you know, red is the color of blood or something.

The production design often seems to be reaching for something, too. Near the beginning of the film, the U.S. Embassy appears to be flying the flag backwards, which could mean something or could just be really poor attention to detail. Some of the set design appears grotesque, but that, too, could just be a function of the film's location shoots.

At least Mia Farrow, as demonic nanny Mrs. Baylock, works intentionally. She plays sweet and reserved, so that when her dark turns happen, they're exciting even though they're not surprising. She's still got it, and she's a welcome presence.

In the role of photographer Keith Jennings, character actor David Thewlis plays character actor David Warner, eerily tying the two versions of The Omen together. Then as now, Jennings proves sympathetic and even heroic, though once again the script almost defies logic with a press corps that's downright polite, calmly parting to let its target pass by.

Unfortunately, all this good acting exists in supporting roles. At the heart of The Omen rests two decent actors that do a lot of internal work in a movie that screams for something big. Casting young (and having to do back flips to explain) changes much of the character motivation and again defies modern logic.

In the original, the stately Gregory Peck played Thorn, with Lee Remick as his wife. Thus Damien comes to them in the afternoon of their lives, almost alluding to Abraham and Sarah with a far more tragic end. Here, the Thorns are just self-absorbed idiots, accepting one priest's opinion that Katherine might never conceive again. In 1975, that might have flown, but with all the fertility advances in 2006 (and this remake is set somewhere within the next couple of years), people with this much money wouldn't take that diagnosis at face value.

But the Thorns take everything at face value. When Robert expresses concern that he has only been named youngest ambassador in history because he's the President's godson, Katherine assures him that two senators wanted the post. Um, yeah, Katherine, that kind of proves the point that this was cronyism, which the audience would believe. The movie doesn't even bother to show us if Robert is good or bad at his job. Instead, Schrieber just walks around with a look of kindly concern that veers into bemusement and just a little bit of teariness when he discovers proof that Damien's mother was a jackal.

Perhaps the worst crime in this remake is in pointing out just how many huge gaps in logic the original had. Case in point, you devil-worshippers out there - just why exactly would you burn down the hospital where Satan's son was born but go to the trouble of burying the baby's mother in consecrated ground in a marked grave?

Evil should cover its tracks better.

Rating:

Derek McCaw