The Exorcism: Even more demon-banishing for Russell Crowe? He needs to kick the habit
What possessed Russell Crowe to make two exorcism flicks in as many years? He was last seen trundling from Rome to northern Spain on a motor-scooter, cassocked, in The Pope’s Exorcist, which was hokey fun in a limited sort of way.
The Exorcism dials the fun down and the meta up. Way up. Crowe is not playing a priest this time, but a washed-up actor playing one on a film set. After two years lost to alcoholism and the death of his wife from cancer, this faded star has landed a key supporting role in a carbon copy (no one uses the word “reboot”) of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist.
The film-in-progress that will co-star Crowe’s character (“The Georgetown Project”) threatens us mainly with murk and dissatisfaction. The same, alas, is true of The Exorcism itself.
Scrutinise the surname of director Joshua John Miller, and yet further layers of self-referentiality announce themselves. He’s the son of Jason Miller, who was Father Damien in Friedkin’s film. Crowe’s character is nudgingly named “Anthony Miller” – which is actually confusing, because in both age and the scale of his part, he seems a closer fit to Max von Sydow.
Puzzling out the finer details here won’t help us much, anyway. This is masturbatory pseudo-horror, with about 20 scattered minutes of even attempted scares. It remains stubbornly confounding – a rough draft with hints of winking wit.
It does start with a promising notion. The original actor earmarked for Crowe’s part meets a sticky end, when he walks around the set one night rehearsing his lines, and demonic forces whip up a demise that could pass for suicide. Incompetently edited as it is, the hook works: why would the Devil want Crowe’s character to get this part instead?
“To possess him” turns out to be the answer. Before he starts looking distinctly mouldy and the opaque contact lenses go in, we trudge through a rapprochement with his daughter (Ryan Simpkins) and a few amusing scenes with the director (a bilious Adam Goldberg) who regrets hiring him. A real-life priest (David Hyde Pierce) is the on-set consultant, unaware that Anthony was abused as an altar boy, which makes his attitude to the collar unsurprisingly queasy.
Semi-intriguing as this may all be, it’s still headed to a formulaic showdown in an upstairs bedroom, with all the usual incantations and ramped-up sound design on a tight budget. It’s priest vs unpriest, this time, with the demon pinging between them. The stakes are just feeble, for all Crowe’s perfectly solid efforts, and the default level of dinge in the film saps all excitement away.
15 cert, 95 min. In cinemas from Friday June 21