The Exorcism is a horror flick with a great idea and terrible execution. If I could score points purely based on cleverness, it’d score pretty high. An exorcism flick set during the filming of a remake of a famous exorcism flick is pretty neat. Catching the hints they drop about a remake of The Exorcist (basically) was fun… for the first twenty minutes.

But, yeah, once you get past the clever bit, Brad Pitt in Fight Club came to mind “How’s that working out for you? Being clever.” Because, yeah, that’s just about all this movie has going for it. Someone had a good idea and someone else wrote a terrible, unfocused, generic script.

At least the movie looks good? but nice uses of blacks and shadows in a horror film should be the bare minimum though.

I’d also like to give the exorcism finale slight recognition for at least not strapping anyone to a bed and chucking holy water at them. It doesn’t make enough of a difference though since the majority of the film is full of generic scares and characters without enough depth. By the time they got to the requisite exorcism, any uniqueness barely mattered.

Russell Crowe plays an actor recovering from a bout of booze… and he’s trying to turn his career around. This is a bit of a backstory he can probably use in his performance… I certainly want the old Crowe back.

Too bad more of the film was about his daughter… who is a character in a movie that one time. I’m not sure what she brings to the film other than being a young person the teen audience can glom onto instead of old farts like Crowe (he said VERY cynically).

They don’t do nearly enough with their big idea of a haunted film set, much less explain why the demon is so interested in a Hollywood film. It was mostly a generic, boring slog. Maybe if they had the rights or courage to actually be about a remake of the The Exorcist, they could have played around with some actual Hollywood myth and history.

And also I shake my tiny fist at an uncaring Hollywood universe that this somehow wasn’t a sequel to The Pope’s Exorcist. I walked in not knowing anything about the film other than the title and Crowe, so you could forgive a guy for feeling cheated by the marketing department. Jokes on them… I’d have seen it either way… but I wonder what others will think when they turn up and don’t get Crowe with a silly Italian accent (though the absolutely empty theater I was in suggests this won’t be a problem).

Score: 63