The Omen

An American ambassador (Liev Schreiber) learns that he and his wife (Julia Stiles) are raising the antichrist. Here’s another entry in the Unnecessary Remake Sweepstakes, this one based on the 30-year-old film with Gregory Peck and Lee Remick—still one of the better son-of-Satan movies. Writer David Seltzer adapts his own 1976 script scene for scene, changing almost nothing; the result is essentially the original movie with cell phones—and, more importantly, without Peck and Remick. Schreiber and Stiles, good as they are, don’t have the same resonance; in the original, it was plain that this was the couple’s only chance to be parents, and Schreiber and Stiles are too young to give it the same urgency. Director John Moore tries for a sinister, foreboding atmosphere but achieves only a leaden pace.