Director Phil D’Antoni produced The French Connection, and he struck while the iron was hot in this gritty, noir follow-up. The pictures seem familiar, sometimes distractingly so. There is no Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle, but in his stead is Doyle’s partner, Roy Scheider, a New York City detective heading up a specialized team, untethered from bureaucracy, with its sights on the mob. Scheider has a mole (Tony LoBianco), a connected guy and childhood pal, who gives him tips. We see some stakeouts and takedowns, a lot of steamy subway grates and bleak streets, the Big Apple as hellscape.
D’Antoni also produced Bullitt, and stayed true to what he knows again, inserting a boffo car chase very reminiscent of McQueen’s ride through and to the outskirts of San Francisco.
But Scheider is no McQueen or Hackman. McQueen had the gravitas that told you everything you needed to know and more about his character, even as he wordlessly dined with the stunning Jackie Bisset or loaded up on TV dinners at the corner market. He had depth and heft. Hackman as Doyle was even more fleshed out, a driven, bigoted, brutal thug, the kind of guy who doesn’t stop chasing you even after he accidentally shoots a cop.
Here, Scheider just isn’t given anything. His relationship with LoBianco is seminal, but we learn little through their clandestine meets. D’Antoni must have realized the problem, as he has a scene of Scheider walking through his old neighborhood, but it feels perfunctory. We don’t know who he is or what makes him tick and that’s a problem.
But not an insurmountable one. Solid, no-nonsense, brisk flick, good nostalgia.
As you may or may not know, when Damien Thorn was placed with the American ambassador to the Vatican (Gregory Peck), his own wife (Lee Remick) had just “lost” their baby during childbirth. Mrs. Thorn would have been devastated, but the ingenious Catholics were Luigi-on-the-spot, procuring another baby boy – Damien – for the old switcheroo. Soon, Damien is in America, freaking out baboons, having the temper tantrum of the ages when driven to church, and killing (or having killed) everyone in his way, including, eventually, Mom and Dad.
I’m a huge fan of the original and even like the sequel, where William Holden and Lee Grant have to deal with their devil of a teenage adopted son. I sort of lost track after that but understand there was a third flick, which wasn’t so good.
So now we go back to before Peck and Remick became the unwitting guardians of Satan. It is 1971 and Margaret, a fresh and seemingly innocent nun, comes to Rome, where she is stationed at an orphanage. Before long, she notices strange doings, and is soon approached by a dissident priest, who informs her that this is no ordinary orphanage, but rather a cabal of right-wing radicals within the Church, so desperate to regain power against secularism – gasp! – they are willing to bring Lucifer back in human form, if only to make themselves relevant.
Because evil had been on a real downslope in the century.
As a cultural Catholic, well-versed in the Church’s byzantine rituals and excesses, I have a lot of bandwidth for this kind of silliness. But even for me, this is painfully stupid. And also, I think, a ripoff of Ron Howard’s hideous fireman movie, where an embittered fireman lights a lot of fires in Chicago to avoid budget cuts.
Sure enough, Margaret finds a fake door that brings her to old files of hideously deformed babies.
The orphanage is, in fact, a baby factory, where Satan (in the form of a jackal) impregnates the girls. Most of the grotesque babies die, confirming they are not The One.
But Old Satan keeps at it.
And I think, this is a ripoff of M. Night Shymalan’s Unbreakable, where Samuel L. Jackson blows up every plane, train and automobile he can hoping to find the “unbreakable” Bruce Willis, who will have survived what cannot be survived.
Also stupid, but somehow, it worked for me.
When Margaret rifles the files, there is a missing picture of one of the would-be hosts.
Guess what?
That girl is Margaret.
You see, the whiz kids in the rectory figured out that if Satan mates with his own spawn, and a child is delivered, then the Church will finally get Damien, not a deformity, and the pews will be full again! And when Margaret first got to town, her nun roomie took her out clubbing, like when the Amish get one crazy weekend in New York, and someone slipped Margaret a mickey so the Devil could get at her.
So, Margaret gets a C-section in the creepy catacombs, and Damien is born.
As is his twin sister.
Sigh.
This is not as bad as it reads. There are some very scary touches, and a smart buildup.
But there is no fun in this picture. In the first Omens, there was real dread and investigation as Peck got closer to the truth, and you wanted to know how folks who found out were going to buy it, and if they’d get Damien in the end.
Here, Margaret acts rather than thinks, and she does not need to be persuaded – dawning hits like a blinding light rather than a slow revelation. Why keep any files at all? Lazy lazy lazy.
Worse, we know they don’t get Damien, and how people meet their end is either repetitious (as in the first movie, a priest catches a piece of a church in the skull and a nun hangs herself after announcing, “It’s all for you!”) or just humdrum.
What is built up to is so hurried and confusing, it cannot sustain interest.
Also, if Margaret is necessary for coupling with Satan and producing Damien, why are the evil nuns so mean to her?
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