director
Renny Harlin
screenwriter
Alexi Hawley
story by
William
Wisher
Caleb Carr
based on
characters created by
William
Peter Blatty
producer
James G. Robinson
cinematographer
Vittorio Storaro
music
Trevor Rabin
editors
Mark Goldblatt
Todd E. Miller
cast
Stellan Skarsgård
(Father Merrin)
Izabella Scorupco (Sarah)
James D'Arcy (Father Francis)
Remy Sweeney (Joseph)
Julian Wadham (Major Granville)
Andrew French (Chuma)
Ben Cross (Semelier)
David Bradley (Father Gionetti)
Alan Ford (Jeffries)
Patrick O'Kane (Bession)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 115m
u.s.
release: 8/20/04
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other renny
harlin films
reviewed on this website:
- deep
blue sea
- driven
- the
long kiss goodnight
see also:
- the
exorcist
- the
exorcist III
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Going back to visit Father
Merrin, the grim-faced priest played by Max von Sydow in 1973's
The
Exorcist, in his younger days must have sounded like
a good idea for a prequel. We would get to see the genesis of
Merrin's wary familiarity with Pazuzu, the troublesome demon
who occupied Linda Blair and made pea-soup sales drop worldwide.
The result as seen in theaters (I'll explain that odd qualification
in a minute) is like a slow-moving installment of the Mummy
or Tomb
Raider series, with the fortyish Merrin (Stellan Skarsgård)
poking around ancient ruins, stumbling across spooky sculptures,
and encountering the most blatantly fake hyenas in the admittedly
small history of fake movie hyenas.
Most of the movie feels nothing
like an Exorcist film. There was an earlier version of
this movie, directed by the brooding Paul Schrader, who delivered
a cut reportedly short on action; Warner cast Schrader's entire
movie aside and hired Renny Harlin to start from scratch. Harlin
can direct fun junk -- I enjoyed The
Long Kiss Goodnight and Deep
Blue Sea as well as his Nightmare on Elm Street
chapter. But Exorcist: The Beginning is simply junk --
ponderous junk. Straining for depth, it gives us a Merrin who
has fallen from faith because of what he endured at the hands
of the Nazis during World War II. Since Merrin here comes off
as a bleary-eyed Indiana Jones, his Holocaust flashback scenes
play as if Steven Spielberg had gone mad and edited bits of Schindler's
List into Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Merrin is hired by a saturnine
Frenchman (Ben Cross, apparently having learned nothing from
his own bad religious horror film, The Unholy) to explore
an old church apparently buried out in the African desert. Weird
things are happening around the dig: the aforementioned hyenas,
plus diggers who have seizures and a clock whose pendulum stops
when Merrin is in the room, just like in the original film. Do
we learn anything new about the demon Pazuzu here? Not really;
the plot redefines "convoluted," involving a Vatican
cover-up (these new religious-schlock movies are nothing without
Vatican cover-ups) and a presumably possessed African boy.
I'll have to wait until Warner
puts out the Schrader version on DVD, but I'd guess it was more
thoughtful than the Harlin version and less dependent on cheap
scares attended by loud stings on the soundtrack. William Friedkin's
original film got some mileage out of cheap shock cuts, too,
but he knew how to distribute them sparingly, sprinkling them
across an otherwise neutral and naturalistic narrative. Here,
the movie is always groaning or rumbling ominously, never establishing
any normality that the demon's presence can violate. It's like
a feature-length remake of the Iraq prologue in the original,
a provocative and haunting bit of filmmaking before we even know
what's going on or what connection it has to demonic activity.
But, unlike that prologue, this film has no mystery. It
turns out, too, that Father Merrin himself is a character best
left shadowy. Poor Stellan Skarsgård tries hard to reproduce
von Sydow's wheezy gravitas, but he's stuck enacting the script's
psychotherapy.
Eventually, this Exorcist
gets around to some exorcism - first in a laughable African ritual
which involves leeches (where do they find leeches out there
in the desert? At the local tackle shop?), then in an
extended action finale in which Merrin faces off against a possessed
person with the ability to leap from wall to wall and bend into
computer-generated pretzels ("Bring back the fake hyenas,"
I almost said at this point). If Pazuzu can give a person the
power to do all this (not to mention crucifying people upside
down and other fun hobbies), how come he couldn't do all that
for Linda Blair, who was confined to her bed by a few knotted
sheets? The climax comes off like the end of a particularly lame
Buffy season finale, with bodies thrown all around and
Merrin literally stopping the demon in its speedy tracks with
a well-aimed cross. Lest you think that Merrin is not a man of
intellect, he's also armed with a book of exorcist stuff, or,
according to the cover, Roman Rituals, Reserved Blessings,
Etc. I adore the "Etc." Exorcism rituals, recipes,
baseball stats, etc.
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