All through November we take a look at box-office bombs and widely maligned turkeys, to let you know if you might have missed a classic. Or not.
Movies that reaffirm faith tend to take more of a thrashing from moviegoers than others, unless they're and marketed directly and exclusively to evangelicals, like God's Not Dead or whatever Kirk Cameron happens to be starring in nowadays. Mainstream religious movies are usually dismissed as silly. I don't quite know why; certainly Bill Maher hasn't had such a wide influence. M. Night Shyamalan takes a licking when his films dare to explore the notion that characters in a horror film are allowed to be redeemed rather than be allowed to fester in a rusty prison like the hapless souls in the Saw films.
Scott Derrickson has been an unabashedly religious filmmaker all along. His first theatrical feature as director, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, was bland anti-science trash, but his later work exhibited more positive themes from a Christian point of view. The Day the Earth Stood Still, while not the tightest film, had an admirable message about stewardship of the earth. Sinister, one of the scariest movies I've recently seen, took a quite conservative stance on the allure of violence, and presented its slayings to be truly horrifying rather than titillating.
Deliver Us from Evil, his latest film, is also decidedly pro-faith, though it understands why its characters have lost it. It doesn't condescend like many films of its type do, nor is its message oversimplified.
It also doesn't quite work, but it's not bad while it's not working. Derrickson and co-writer Paul Harris Boardman put more work into this film than the usual demonic possession romp usually gets.
NYPD Officer Ralph Sarchie (Eric Bana) is known for having a "radar" that leads him to the right criminal. When he sets upon one man and one woman who are committing strange crimes, he links them to an Iraq War veteran who may have brought something evil back to New York with him. A local priest, Fr. Mendoza (Edgar Ramirez, of the brilliant epic Carlos), offers his help.
The film unfortunately comes bearing the dreaded "Based on a true story" disclaimer, which has doomed brave films before it, like The Conjuring. Most "true" horror films suffer either from changing the story too much, or from trying too hard to be convincing. Oddly enough, there really isn't much in the film I can't imagine happening. Though there are fleeting supernatural moments, the villains are all decidedly human. The movie does have some spooky scary boogeyman moments, and an exorcism scene that's beyond silly, but at the center it's about how real evil shows itself: through violence, hate, and vengeance.
Bana and Ramirez are solid anchors for the film, lending credibility to a screenplay that's always threatening to go cuckoo. A late scene in which Sarchie confesses the reason for his loss of faith to Mendoza has an awfully familiar arc, but Bana and Ramirez deliver it captivatingly. Joel McHale (yes, Joel McHale) is a welcome presence as Sarchie's streetwise partner. Sean Harris is appropriately nasty as the perpetrator, a demon with a particular affinity for Jim Morrison. (I like that the movie never explains why the demon keeps quoting The Doors. Maybe he just likes them.)
The movie still doesn't quite come together. The police procedural plot is trite, and we've seen Sarchie's family sub-plot a thousand times before. What do you want to bet that the tough cop has trouble being open and honest with his loving wife (Olivia Munn) and daughter? What do you want to bet they'll patch things up in the end?
As with most demonic possession movies nowadays, the final exorcism is a letdown. It's always a shame when a movie that's been pretty savvy all along descends into hysterics and shouting. Derrickson lends the film enough nice touches that we wish it had been a more cohesive work.
** 1/2 out of ****
NOTE: The movie's final line is "Do you reject Satan and all his works?" I am disappointed that the response was not "Yes, except 'Light My Fire.'"
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