L'esorcista del papa

Russell Crowe plays the real life Pope's exorcist, Gabriele Amorth. Father Amorth passed away in 2006 and its probably a good thing. While this movie is spooky and entertaining, its a big, exaggerated, and I assume highly fictionalized, version of a time in Father Amorth's life.

The Pope (Franco Nero) assigns Father Amorth to look into a potential demonic possession of a young boy in Spain. The boy, Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney), his mother Julia (Alex Essoe) and his sister Amy (Laurel Marsden) are Americans who move to Spain after the death of Henry's father in a car accident. They are living in an old Spanish abbey that is the only think Julia's husband left them when he died in a car accident the year before. A local priest, Father Esquible (Daniel Zovatto) is out of his element, but is enlisted by Amorth to assist in the exorcism.

The possession tropes are all here. Contortions, scary voices, lights going on and off, crosses turning upside down, people getting thrown around, possessed people spewing fluids and cursing, climbing walls and crawling around like spiders. There is a mystery about the origin of the abbey dealing with the church's role in the Inquisition.

There is some gratuitous nudity that just felt out of place in this movie. I mean, I like naked breasts as much as the next guy, but it just felt a bit uneccessary.

Crowe does a really good job as Father Amorth. He has the right balance of faith, weariness and conviction for someone who faces evil of all kinds. Zovatto's performance as Father Esquibel, to me, was the highlight of the film. He keeps everything grounded, despite the bizarre happenings. All three of the actors playing the family members are cookie-cutter performances and don't really add or subtract from the proceedings. There are some genuine chills in this move and a few scary moments. I enjoyed it and its crisp runtime kept it from getting boring. Still, I was hoping for a bit more story and less stunt work. I mean how many times do we need to see someone get thrown across a room into a mirrored wall and get right back up? One character, while wrestling with a possessed child, gets their head smashed through a ceramic sink with no effect. I might have tapped out and sought some aspirin.

Enjoy it for what it is. Then go watch the Exorcist again.

Oh dear. I'm not sure if the makers of this movie were going for comedy horror or something else but it didn't really work. It was basically a film of silly voices. There wasn't enough tension to hold my engagement or enough story to keep me interested.

Some of the effects were good but nothing I haven't seen before. Russell Crowe was enjoyable to watch but it was difficult to take his character seriously and I'm not sure as a viewer I was supposed to. It was all just a bit too silly for my taste. I didn't believe the setting, it was too fantastical and the family characters were more like caricatures. It sort of hinted at a story for them but that didn't really go anywhere. So, superfluous and silly but not awful.

This is a decent movie. Entertaining and basically a new adaptation of the old Exorcist movie from 1973. While based on a real character the story is completely made up but at least entertaining. If you like horror type movies this may be ideal for you. Any while it is not a great movie, it is heads and shoulders above much of the awful PC garbage that Hollywood produces these days. Russell Crowe is quite good as Father Gabriel Amorth as is Franco Nero who plays the Pope in this movie. While I can live without some of the silliness like a possessed person crawling around like a spider, the movie is still entertaining, which is the reason we watch movies in the first place.

I honestly went in their with really low expectations. I walked out of The Devil in Me as we've seen it all before it's the same formula and nothing ever will live up to the original Exorcist. I think I can name 3 good exorcism movies. The Exorcist, Exorcist 3 and the Exorcism of Emily Rose. The plot really gets moving fast! There's no real character building but what I will say is Russell Crowe really does play the part well. It's a mixture of a great performance and a parody..whatever it is it works! It doesn't really do anything new, we've seen it all before but for some reason or another this was better than expected. Give it a watch.

It's a double edged sword when an actor becomes super famous. On one side, they are extremely marketable and gain great roles. However, on the other side, we tend to see the actor in the movie and not the character which distracts from the experience of the story.

This was not the case with this film. I'm not an accent specialist nor a native Italian speaker, but Russell's portrayable had me convinced.

The story itself was exciting and intriguing. There were some nonsensical aspects of course. Its a very fictional film with its own share of contradictions that are noticeable. The authenticity of the Vatican traditions and language barriers might have been compromised, but as a normal viewer, none of it was recognizable thus not bothered.

Overall I give this a 7. It's not going to leave a lasting impression on me, but It was a good to watch.