31 Days of Halloween: The divisive Exorcist Believer
I’m not sure why it’s so hard to make a sequel to the original Exorcist. They’ve tried about five times now to do a sequel or a prequel, but they’re not that good, except for Exorcist III which has Brad Douriff and George C Scott to carry it. But even that had multiple reshoots and shoehorned in more stuff mandated by the studio. Now imagine a studio mandate except done for the whole film, and you’ve got Exorcist Believer, the newest cash grab from David Gordon Green and Blumhouse. This is not a trashy, B-level movie, but Exorcist Believer lost me somewhere along the way with its themes, because David Gordon Green doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing with another franchise. It has good production values, interesting imagery, and the acting is pretty darn good, maybe wooden in some places and cliche in others, but Leslie Odom Jr does some good work in this movie.
Leslie Odom Jr plays Victor, who loses his pregnant wife in an Earthquake. The opening is shot really well and I was right there with these guys as Victor struggled to find his wife. He manages to find her at a red cross center or shelter of some kind, helping people after the quake, and a doctor makes him decide between the life or his unborn daughter or his wife. There’s really just not enough time spent on the tension built up by decisions like these, and it impacts Odom’s character throughout the movie, such as the next series of scenes where Victor is overprotective of his daughter. You don’t even really need to see the rest of the movie, because the studio stupidly gave away most of it in the trailer, where you see the daughter and her friend become possessed. Big surprise.
Ellen Burstyn doesn’t show up until about halfway through, and gives some advice then tries to perform her own exorcism using her studies of the rituals all over the world. She’s not an ordained priest or nun or anything though. It doesn’t work that well (duh) and the movie focuses on other characters while she’s on the sidelines. Why? I’m guessing because they didn’t have Burstyn until late in the game, but it doesn’t really matter because her character is written like garbage and her part in the movie is just terrible. Apparently, she’s written a book about Reagan’s experience, even though Burstyn was never in the room while the priests gave their lives for Reagan. She runs down the priests by saying that she wasn’t allowed in the room because of the patriarchy, which is just woke as hell, and smells like David Gordon Green. Meanwhile, a priest called in to help and he’s immediately killed by the demon and thrown away like trash, replaced with some themes about community teaming up to stay strong and fight the demon themselves or some crap like that. Six different religious people of various faiths are trotted in and do their crap all at once, with no rhyme or reason to any of it and everybody’s yelling and carrying on, arguing with the demon, and it just made me head hurt trying to follow it. What it comes down to is David Gordon Green has too many ideas shoved in there when he only needed one coherent thread to move the story and make it dramatic and respectable. It’s just a mess.
Overall, this movie is terrible. When Green’s ideas start to slow down, Exorcist Believer throws in random callbacks to the original Exorcist, and other threads pop up with no development. It’s pretty obvious the movie had no ending or had one and it was reshot or something. Who knows. The girls spit green goop at everybody because that’s a thing that happened in the original. None of the six exorcists really do much of anything and Green just leaves the conclusion up to chance and a random event, because the movie eventually has to end. He just doesn’t know how to fine tune his movies to have a central idea and his movies feel like a jumble of a lot of different things because of it. This is Green’s biggest problem and it happened in the Halloween movies too. It’s especially bad on a big budget movie like this where they spent 400 million dollars and I think most of it went to Burstyn’s twenty minute contribution, which is a shame because they could have done so much more to fine tune the movie and keep Green under control.
