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Critic Reviews
- Critic score
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- By date
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Not bad if it’s your thing.
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Damien the TV series is a fairly generic supernatural conspiracy thriller with elements of the police procedural, a well-populated genre.
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A&E's Damien joins the franchise, offering spooky and violent moments through its first five episodes, but struggling to find the narrative momentum necessary to work as an ongoing series.
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The pilot is relatively inert for a thriller as it pretty much tacks in all the expected directions.
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The early episodes are the most overly ripe. Eventually, we get used to the bad dialogue and unintentionally funny direction and performances and surrender to the fundamental mystery of who Damien is, not to mention the question of the real identities and purpose of various people around him.
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At its core, though, the show feels hollow, in part because of the waffling approach to its central character.... Taken strictly on its own terms, Damien is mildly fun through these episodes, its flaws notwithstanding.
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Damien has moments of nicely spooky atmospherics, but it’s neither scary nor fun, and when you’re dealing with this topic and this character, you have to move in one of those two directions, or you’ll just lose the battle to the devil of tedium.
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Damien feels like dramatic purgatory. [7-10 Mar 2016, p.19]
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Unfortunately, the premiere is more depressing than scary, often feeling as if we're being sucked slowly into quicksand.
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Damien is nothing more than cliche, right down to the use of Rottweilers as hellhounds.
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The pilot is rushed, the direction is flat, the imagination is lacking. [11 Mar 2016, p.76]
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That a series centered around the Antichrist is this scare-free, weirdly witless, and dramatically inert comes as a deeply unpleasant surprise.
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Just as drear and dreadful as that history would suggest.... The constant pre-apocalyptic jitters get in the way of James creating much of a character.
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Hershey’s commitment to the role is impressive, but it’s not enough to follow Damien into the schlockiest circle of TV hell.
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With a visual palette of dim neutrals and its only modes of darkness being dour realism and harmless fantasy, Damien suggests nothing so much as a hotel bar. Its death sequences are hit or miss when it comes to horror, but at least they display some imagination.
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The lack of suspense and originality is depressing.
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The pilot episode features some handsome compositions, but neither the imagery nor the predictable plodding of the story suggest any insights into concepts of fate, religion, free will, and human nature.
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It is a show in search of the right tone, littered with laughable dialogue and a notable uncertainty of what it’s supposed to be. The horror doesn’t work, the characters aren’t defined and the plot is ludicrous. You’d be better off watching one of the “Omen” sequels.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 83 out of 120
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Mixed: 9 out of 120
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Negative: 28 out of 120
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Apr 15, 2016
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Apr 5, 2016
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Apr 16, 2016