by William Brooks
Spin your head 180° to look away from the screen; there’s nothing to be compelled by here.
Sitting down to compile my thoughts on David Gordon Green’s latest grave-robbing expedition (read: The Exorcist: Believer) has me more than slightly unenthused. Since its release earlier this month, Believer has been about as popular with audiences as a used tampon in a chocolate fountain. So, now I belatedly arrive on the scene after all the boots have been put in, and all that’s left for me to pick over is a pathetic spit-covered mass assuming the fetal position while gently sobbing to itself.
Image: Variety
“I’ve heard spicy things about this one” trilled my editor in last week’s email, with an air of knowing glee usually reserved for a child getting ready to knock and run after setting down a flaming bag of dog shit on their neighbour’s porch. Well, how do you know I won’t disappoint you and buck the trend? What if I actually really like Believer?! … I don't; it's fucking atrocious, but you’d have looked pretty silly if I had, wouldn’t you!?
Two years ago, Universal Pictures made a bold move, investing $400 million for the rights to the dormant Exorcist franchise. Inexplicably, they then decided to put such a project in the hands of Scott Teems, Danny McBride, and of course, David Gordon Green to kick off the first entry of a planned (threatened?) horror trilogy. And while their Halloween revival proved to be an exercise in diminishing returns, this time they have managed to condense the same downward trajectory into an impressively succinct 111 minutes.
The plot hardly matters. If you’re at all familiar with the conventions of William Friedkin’s classic, then you already know exactly what’s in store for you. Demon-possessed tweens spewing vulgarities via a two-tone voice effect? Check. A blast of Mike Oldfield? Yep. The projectile barfing of split pea soup? Yawn-o-rama! Fifty years removed from their hugely impactful first impression into pop culture infamy, these tired cliches no longer feel transgressive and possess all the shock value of a worn-out AA battery.
There is but a strand of chewing gum connecting this film to the 1973 classic, and that comes in the form of Ellen Burstyn making an oh-so-brief return as Chris MacNeil in a role so inconsequential that one wonders, why bother? Straight out of the Legacy Sequels For Dummies playbook (that Green practically co-authored), her character is unearthed, blinking, and lives a pathetic existence as a lonely drunk, still wallowing in the events of the first film. In her fleeting screentime, she expresses frustrations about the Catholic Church’s patriarchy barring her from attending her daughter’s exorcism. This is not only incorrect and constitutes a grave misreading of the entire point of the first film, but is also quite the expression of gratitude to the two men who died to save her daughter’s soul from eternal damnation.
Image: BBC News
Anyway, once she is dispatched, the film sets about juggling four or five equally unappealing subplots. Ann Dowd is a next-door neighbour who, on top of being in the medical field, was also almost a nun, so she can step in and do an exorcism when a priest gets cold feet. What a remarkably convenient, all-in-one next-door neighbour to include in your remarkably unimpressive screenplay! Also invited to the party are practitioners of hoodoo; the local Protestant minister; friends of the family and, for old-time's sake, a Roman Catholic padre. By the time the exorcism eventually arrives, there is barely enough space around the two possessed girls to swing a scapular, and it evokes but a fraction of the tension inspired by the original’s intimate final act.
There’s simply nothing in Believer that makes me want to revisit this world again. I didn’t like the new characters (despite mostly solid performances from the cast) and was unimpressed with what was done with the old ones.
At the end of the film, there is no hook or justification for two more films that will inevitably also end up feeling painfully derivative, forever cowering in the huge shadow still cast by Friedkin’s masterwork. That is unless they follow through on that one line from the trailer where Chris MacNeil says that “every religion” has a version of exorcism, and that “it’s going to take all of them”. Imagine a Rabbi, a Pujari, a Haitian witch doctor, and a Scientology minister at the front of a miles-long queue getting ready to lay the smackdown on Satan like that “Get a hold of yourself” scene from Airplane! (1980). This bizarre multidenominational angle was presumably introduced via some marketing think tank due to the fact that the Catholic Church is about as popular these days as … well, this film.
(This article was edited by George Wilson)
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