The Final Conflict: Omen III (1981)

As a movie promising the last final battle between the forces of God and Satan, The Final Conflict flies pretty low.  That’s especially disappointing since this is the third in The Omen trilogy which has been building up to this point and promising the showdown to end all showdowns.  In the first movie Damian Thorn was born and became a demon child, the anti-Christ, the Son of Satan.  In the second he was a young teenager beginning to learn his power.  Here, reasonably enough, he is the CEO of a multi-national corporation and the Ambassador to Great Britain. 

Those steps leading to Damien’s domination of the world are pretty solid.  If Satan were going to take over the world, you might imagine that he would be crafty enough to do it from the inside out, work the world’s financial and political situation into such a state of chaos that he could slip in and take over (actually he could do just as well to sit back and let us do it ourselves).

The problem with these movies is that they are repetitious: Good people come to discover Damian’s lineage, try to kill him, and come to a gruesome end.  In the first movie David Warner had his head sliced off.  In the second, Meshach Taylor was sliced in half by a high-voltage wire.  Here Robert Alden commits suicide by shooting himself in a head.  The murders are a distraction to keep us from noticing that the movie isn’t really generating much of a global threat.  It promises what it can’t deliver.

Here Sam Neill plays Damien in a pretty menacing performance as a guy who can move from charming in public to intimidating in private and that’s a promise that, again, the movie doesn’t follow up on.  The plot has seven priests trying to kill him with seven sacred daggers and all meeting, again, gruesome fates.  And in the end, we are promised a final showdown.  We are promised that this will be the decisive battle to see who rules over mankind, and when it comes, it’s kind of weak and disappointing.  This time Jesus makes a cameo but he doesn’t do anything but stand there and look, I don’t know . . . disappointed?  Whatever it is, it’s unmoving, uninteresting, and really just disappointing.