Review
EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING
Starring Stellan Skarsgard, Izabella Scorupco and James D’Arcy
Directed by Renny Harlin
Now playing
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May the power of Christ compel you to stay far, far away from Hollywood hack Renny Harlin’s prequel to The Exorcist.
Unfortunately, the scariest, most disturbing thing about Exorcist: The Beginning is its controversial production history, which has shown once again that studio execs can be just as petty and vengeful as any Old Testament God. To make a long story short, Harlin was hired to re-shoot almost the entire film from a new script after the pinheads at Morgan Creek decided to shelve the version that Paul Schrader had already completed for them. Or, as Schrader put it, paraphrasing Robert Altman, in a recent interview with the U.K. publication The Guardian, "Every time you think that they've fucked you every way they can, guess what? They come up with a new one."
Granted, I haven’t seen Schrader’s film, but I have seen Harlin’s and it’s difficult to imagine that Schrader’s could be any worse. Harlin, after all, is the person whose recipe for filmmaking goes something like this:
· Act 1: Big whammies.
· Act 2: Whammies mount up.
· Act 3: All whammies.
Following this formula, Exorcist: The Beginning contains plenty of predictable suspense tactics to make its audience jump out of their seats, but none of the psychological sophistication to make them believe that anyone up on the screen might actually be possessed by the Devil. Or Pazuzu. Or whatever you want to call the demon that made Linda Blair spew pea-soup vomit all over Max von Sydow in William Friedkin’s freaky 1973 original. Even for a nonbeliever like me, The Exorcist manages to do that every time I see it.
Beyond the simple fact that Harlin’s film is just not intelligent enough to be genuinely frightening, it also provides The Beginning to nothing. The film denies simple facts of the original story and completely fails to deliver on the idea that Father Lancaster Merrin (Stellan Skarsgard) first exorcised Pazuzu from an eight-year-old African boy. The fault for this does not lie with Skarsgard, one of the best film actors of our time, who manages to invest his cliché role – as a priest who has lost his faith – with as much dignity as possible. The fault lies in the fatuous screenplay by Alexi Hawley and Harlin’s even more asinine and incoherent directorial choices. For a film that ought to raise questions about the capacity for evil that resides in each of us, it sure spends a lot of time trying to frighten us with stupid whammies.
Personally, I’d recommend waiting for Schrader’s version on DVD. Nothing’s confirmed yet, but the film will probably be released on home video next year. |
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