The Omen 666 -– Directed by John Moore. Creepy Thriller. The Devil Wears Buster Browns when a bad seed starts growing and growing and coming toward you. 110 minutes Color 2006.
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There is a difference between a role and a character. A role is The Mother, The Husband, The Child. But the writer must also make characters of them or all we have is cutouts. The character allows the actor to create humans out of and inside those roles. It’s done with words said by a character that make him alive, human, and particular. Dickens was a master at this. A character should be like no one else on earth. A character is also created by actions which also define him, by the term Part we mean the action the actor who plays the role takes. “I play the role of the boyfriend. It’s the part of the boyfriend who kills the ogre.” In Omen 666 there there are roles but no characters, save two. They are not, however, created by the writers, but by the sheer eccentricity of the actors who play them, David Thewlis and Pete Postlethwaite, actors also of a rare power — by which I mean freedom in their craft. Each brings such particularity to his work because of his voice and appearance, that they come alive, immediately. Julia Stiles as The Mother, however, has no such personality. She is a good actor, of course, but that’s all you’re left with. Not a human being but an actor. Liev Schreiber is another good actor, but the same is true of him. He has a fine figure, a beautiful and well-placed voice, and an interesting face which has no bad camera angles. But he has no lines. Nothing that he says rings true, not because he is unconvincing but because the lines are empty. He has no character to bring to life; he has nothing to work with, but himself, and he himself is not A Role, not An Ambassador, not The Father Of That Boy, not Someone in that situation, because the writers have not made that Someone into an individual. Give an actor as good as Liev Schreiber the merest clue, and he will make of it a memorable creation. Not here. It’s not his fault. The script is clueless. Millions have been spent on this production. You notice it because that’s all there is to notice. When Postlethwaite died, I turned it off.
Michael Gambon, Mia Farrow