THE EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING
8.20.04
By Devin Faraci
The Exorcist: The Beginning is a terrible film. This review will contain spoilers, as I want to dissuade you from going to see this piece of crap.
Set in 1949, Renny Harlin’s film is about the young(er) Father Merrin, the priest from the original 1973 classic horror film. This movie attempts to depict the first time Merrin tangled with the devil, but it seems that the real Satanism was taking place behind the camera, not in front of it.
The Exorcist: The Beginning recasts the priest into the cop role. In this film Merrin has lost his faith; he’s the John McClane of the Roman Catholic Church. Drunk and dissolute, he’s wasting his life someplace when he gets called in to investigate a 1500 year old church in a part of Africa that didn’t have Christianity 1500 years ago. It’s established that ex-Father Merrin is aces at the Roman Rituals, which include the exorcism ritual, just like most of the generic action films set up the burned out ex-officer as having once been a great cop.
The film treats the priest like a cop in other ways. As it heads towards its action film climax, complete with a brawl, Merrin gathers his “weapons” – a cross, a bit of holy water (even though any water he blesses would be holy water – this movie is less concerned with the underpinnings of the Church than most action films are with physics) and that scarf priests wear. He uses that scarf as an actual weapon at one point, by the way. He puts it up on the devil’s mouth and induces it to do some wire work stunt jumping.
The plot of the film is a morass of absolute stupidity. Merrin is supposed to retrieve some ancient artifact from this church (why? For who? Don’t bother asking), and when he gets there he meets the motley crew of what I have to call characters only because there’s no other word to easily describe these ciphers who only exist to get knocked off by the devil, who has taken up the serial killing game. There’s a young priest, Father Expendable Exposition; a guy who has some sort of a job on the archeological dig whose main feature is a less repulsive than the filmmakers intended set of boils; a young woman doctor who I guess is supposed to be attractive; and a whole bunch of African savages who will be alternately condescended to in both the old fashioned way, as silly superstitious savages, and in the new PC way, as wisely silly superstitious savages.
It seems that the opening of the ancient church has loosed the devil or a devil or an FX artist intent on recreating Dick Smith’s seminal possession makeup. The church, we learn from Father Expendable Exposition, was built on the site of a huge massacre, which in turn occurred where Lucifer fell to Earth after he had been cast out of heaven. This place, my friends, has some bad juju – the massacre happened when a holy army sent to wipe out the evil was Touched by the Devil and turned on one another (one priest survived to tell the tale, which is shown in the prologue of the film. The camera pulls back to show what appears to be a hundred thousand dead guys – it looks like the carnage at the end of the big battle in the prologue of the Fellowship of the Ring. This, by the way, is not the only moment when this abominable film quotes those movies). Fifty years earlier the church was opened – and everybody killed each other! Guess what will happen now?
In Spinal Tap it’s said that there’s a fine line between clever and stupid. I don’t feel that the line between suspense and tedium is all that fine, but this movie manages to step over it time and again. The first half of the movie is full of dreadful portentous moments that either go nowhere or end in cheap shocks. I’m amazed that there are no cats leaping out of cubbards in this film.
There are, however, CGI hyenas leaping at things. There are also CGI flies in CGI swarms, some CGI possessed girl, CGI scenery, a CGI sandstorm just visiting from the Mummy, and a final CGI shot so laughable it makes you wonder if this whole movie hasn’t been some incredibly sick joke. The CGI hyenas are probably the most egregious of the lot (although those fucking flies come really close), if only because they appear to be incompletely rendered. In fact, wire frame hyenas would have been more interesting and I could have at least pretended I was watching Tron or that Simpsons Tree House of Horror where Homer falls into the third dimension.
The CGI hyenas are put to work furthering one of the movie’s main themes, the torture of children. They rip a kid to shreds while his brother, Uganda MacGuffin watches on menacingly. The movie also shoots a girl in the head, a scene replayed maybe four or five times (complete with some ultra shitty looking CGI blood spray), and ties Uganda MacGuffin to a bed, covers him with leeches and is about to kill him before it takes him to a cave under the old church where he is further tortured by having to be in the rest of the film.
The girl getting shot is a flashback to the events that took Father Merrin’s faith. While priesting it up in some European town in WWII, the Nazis roll in and round up a couple of extras willing to work for access to the crafts service table. The swishy Nazi leader, looking like Hedwig in SS drag, tells Merrin that he must choose which townspeople will die. When Merrin says himself, Herr Plotzdevice shoots a little girl. Merrin relents and picks out other, older townsfolk to kill.
His isn’t the only WWII story – the young doctor was in a concentration camp (but she wasn’t a Jew. I’m not sure why the movie needs to go out of its way to tell us that she isn’t Jewish but that she was harboring Jews. Perhaps they felt that exorcising the devil from a Jew would have too many ugly implications, but then again they decided to stage a sub-par Zulu which we’ll get to later). Now we think that maybe this film could go places, maybe we could have a meditation on the nature of evil.
The first Exorcist reflected societal fears of a youth gone wild, of the disintegration of the family, of people moving away from faith. Now the idea of examining big evil makes sense – we live in a time when fanatics blow themselves up for their god, when they fly planes into buildings for holiness. What is the meaning of evil, is it a bigger force than us or is it a human failing?
Well, I just gave you the film’s entire discourse on the nature of evil. It takes place during a quick conversation. Further, Merrin’s fall from faith makes no sense – what happens to him is pretty terrible, but we’re reminded by the movie that things that were much worse occurred in that war. Merrin isn’t denied by God in the scene, unless he takes the Herr Plotzdevice at his word: “God isn’t here today” (and oooh, isn’t it spooky when the devil says that same thing to Merrin later? No.). Merrin’s set up as a moral and religious pussy – he gives up his faith too easily. A movie with balls would have had Merrin in a camp, seeing what a place without God looks like. Post WWII and post 9/11 that question has real meaning – this movie uses it as a set up for its main character’s clichéd state at the beginning of the film.
I don’t know if Paul Schrader’s version of this film gave Merrin more of a reason to lose his faith, but I know that it had to better than this movie. Of course the whole saga, where Paul Schrader made the movie and then Warner Bros brought on a new director to rewrite and redo almost the whole thing, is much more interesting than anything that appears onscreen.
Stellan Skarsgard looks defeated by the film. Part of it, I’m sure, is his acting ability as the equally defeated Merrin, but it’s obvious that this film turned into a nightmare for him. By the end, as Merrin chases Uganda MacGuffin into the caves beneath the church, you can see in his eyes the way he is resigned to being in the worst film of his career. And it’s been a bad summer for his career, as he was in the astonishingly atrocious King Arthur earlier.
I was defeated by the end of the film as well. We had been led to believe all along that the devil was in Uganda MacGuffin, but it turns out that it was in the doctor, which makes no sense as we see Uganda more or less ordering CGI hyenas to kill his brother earlier when the woman isn’t around. The devil has no time for sense, though, and we’re supposed to be shocked when the doctor is possessed after showing no signs of the devil at any earlier point besides a really bad period.
She takes little MacGuffin into the bowels of the church for reasons that are not clear. Meanwhile the African savages and the English army who are stationed nearby prepare to put on a community theater version of the Battle of Helms Deep (remember how some people read racial allegories into Lord of the Rings, with the white men of the west versus the corrupt races? Renny Harlin decides “fuck allegory and subtext” and just pretty much stages a battle like that) . They are aided by a timely sandstorm which attempts to hide the fact that there are about six people on either side of the battle. While this goes on Merrin gets his groove back (for reasons that are as mystifying as to why he lost it in the first place – he never sees anything SO supernatural or evident of God to warrant his reformation, besides the idea that there are no atheists in foxholes) and dukes it out with devil doctor. This being 2004 there must be actual brawling, and the possessed woman seems to be part vampire – Merrin puts a holy water cross on his forehead and presses it to her face. She sizzles and hisses and screams like a Hot Topic goth acting out Lestat.
Finally the movie has a scene so ludicrous I couldn’t believe I was watching it. After brawling a bit the devil doctor comes running at Merrin down an impossibly long hallway, and he is shouting lines from the original Exorcist at her while someone uses a Photoshop distortion effect to make her look weird. JUST as she gets to him after sprinting a hundred yards, the devil is driven from her. But psyche! Her head opens up for reasons far too mysterious to ever bother divulging to the audience. Then the movie drags on for ten more minutes and you are free, your sins hopefully expunged from all this penance.
Speaking of penance, the movie’s religion is woeful. It has that sort of fake Hollywood mumbo jumbo dealing with cursed objects and evil spirits, but with priest collars on. The idea of pagan Africans battling the devil is briefly interesting, but Harlin makes sure to condescend to them – they can battle the devil by killing the host (and they’re wrong about who it is anyway) but only the Church can battle the devil and save the host (if not physically, due to the movie’s need to get Merrin back to being a priest for continuity sake, then spiritually). A comparison of the pagan antics of the Africans and the semi-pagan Roman Catholic antics would have been interesting, instead we get some Latin from Merrin and what looks like dance moves cribbed from Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla.
There are people who will walk out of Exorcist: The Beginning and say, “It wasn’t that bad.” “It had some good parts.” “It was fun.”
These people are the enemy. While many of us look at the studios as the culprits in the steady stream of sewage hitting our theaters, these people are giving aid and comfort to the people who make this crap. We cannot stem the tide at its source, but we can destroy the demand for this shit. Poorly made movies do not deserve to be seen. If you go to the movies this weekend, see Garden State or Collateral or almost anything else. The scariest thing about The Exorcist: The Beginning is that you might sit through it.
1.4 out of 10
