by John Noonan
Worth: $4.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Russell Crowe, Ryan Simpkins, Sam Worthington, Adam Goldberg, Chloe Bailey, Adrian Pasdar, Marcenae Lynette, David Hyde Pierce, Samantha Mathis
Intro:
… a toothless affair that plays itself way too seriously and whose biggest crime is that it’s just not very interesting
Having seemingly been done with the Catholic Church in last year’s The Pope’s Exorcist, Russell Crowe dons the vestments again in Joshua John Miller’s The Exorcism. Crowe plays Anthony Miller, a Bojack Horseman kind of actor who has spent the last couple of years camping out at the bottom of a bottle. At the same time as his daughter Lee (Ryan Simpkins) is expelled from school, Anthony bags a cushy lead role in a new horror after his predecessor supposedly suicides.
The movie-within-a-movie is referred to at one point as ‘a remake’, but is pretty much The Exorcist in all but name. Sure, voices at the back of the room can be heard shouting that most movies based around exorcisms are derivative of William Friedkin’s classic, but the similarities are more than surface level. From the much talked about ‘cold room’ – a bedroom set refrigerated to below zero – where Anthony will film most of his exorcism scenes, to lead actress Monica (Marcenae Lynette) channelling her best Reagan during filming, it’s hard to escape what’s being aped here. Hell, we even have Adam Goldberg as director Peter verbally abusing Anthony to get the best performance out of him. The connections to The Exorcist become stronger when you take into account The Exorcism director’s own father is Father Karras himself, Jason Miller.
Once on set, things are decidedly not normal for cast and crew, leading to Lee and onset advisor, Father Conor (David Hyde Pierce), believing that a real demon, Moloch, is going after Anthony’s very soul. It would be no surprise if it ever came out that this was supposed to be an interpretation of E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire, which saw F. W. Murnau hire a real vampire as his lead in Nosferatu. And to be honest, a knowing demon flick that played with what we know about the 1973 horror would have a fertile ground to work with, given all that happened on the set of that classic. Looking at you, Friedkin!
Instead, The Exorcism is a toothless affair that plays itself way too seriously and whose biggest crime is that it’s just not very interesting. Admittedly, there are one or two serviceable scares, but they’re just simply not enough. Crowe, for his part, gives off the air of not wanting to be there. Even when he becomes fully consumed by Moloch, he simply growls a bit and literally stands around. Given his unhinged performance in, ahem, Unhinged, you know that Crowe is better than this.
That’s not to lay all the blame on Crowe, though. Something about The Exorcism feels like there’s been a modicum of producer (one of whom is Mr Meta Horror Master himself, Kevin Williamson) interference to get the film down to a brisk 90 minute running time. Some plot threads go nowhere after being introduced, a romance between Lee and Monica feels rushed and the ending suggests what we see on screen was not the original intent. When a character throws themselves out of their apartment window and it’s not explained how they survived in the next scene, you really do start to ask questions.
Does that mean that further down the road The Exorcism will be embraced and reinvented as a midnight cult classic? Maybe, but it’ll be a hard-earned battle to get there. And there’s not even a scene of Crowe riding a vespa to a Faith No More soundtrack to make it worthwhile.