William Peter Blatty gave the world one of the greatest written works of all time with his smash hit, The Exorcist. Two years after the novel was unleashed, Blatty teamed up with William Friedkin to deliver a timeless terror juggernaut with a film version. For forty years, both the novel and film have held dark hearts captive. Coming off a very financially successful, yet controversial, run at the Halloween franchise, David Gordon Green once again teams up with Blumhouse Productions in an attempt to reboot arguably the greatest horror film of all time. While Green ran hot and cold with his Halloween films, he will be given no such leeway when it comes to this franchise. With a passionate worldwide fanbase, can the Green team put out a sequel that will once again have the Horror Nation grasping their crucifixes?
After a family tragedy, Victor (Leslie Odom, Jr.) is left to raise his daughter Angela (Lidya Jewett) on his own. Angela, always wanting to connect with a mother she never knew, and her friend Katherine (Olivia Marcum) decide to attempt a séance in the woods. Three days later, the girls are found in a barn, thirty miles from their original location. After a medical examination comes back clean, the girls are sent home. Shortly after their homecoming, both girls begin to exhibit psychotic behavior. After no reasonable explanations can be found for the physical and psychological transformations, both families turn toward spiritual help. Victor seeks out Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn.) MacNeil has become one of the foremost experts in possession, taking her experiences and putting them into a bestselling novel. Victor, MacNeil, Katherine’s family, and an assembly of religious practitioners unite to face and cast out the demonic forces that have possessed these young girls.
Green, Danny McBride, Scott Teems, and Peter Sattler, developed this entry. It took four people to write a bad, bland, and boring plot. While the team attempted to bind new ideas with old franchise staples, the end result is a convoluted mess. Odom, Jr. and Burstyn do their best to bring forth some kind of light in this dim film, while Marcum and Jewett are solid with the abysmal amount of screen time they receive. If the plot is poor, the pacing is atrocious. Gone is anything resembling a terrifying transition into possession, which is what made the original so frightening. This plot is a full speed train with no destination. After one demon attack, there is zero explanation as to why one of the girls is allowed to be released from an institution. That is the kind of careless continuity that gets most scripts tossed in the trash can. This entry attempts to bring new religions into the fold, but only gives minimal background on each denomination, while nearly completely abandoning the Catholic perspective. No one expected the kind of brave scenes that made the original horrifying, but this installment could almost get a PG rating with its insanely bland possession scenes, which would be hard to frighten a modern pre-teen. Though nowhere near anything resembling the original classic, the end of the film makes the entry watchable, barely. The Exorcist: Believer is an arrogant sequel that poorly attempts to mold a masterpiece into a contrived format. The 400-million-dollar price tag to get the rights to the franchise may be a big stretch to recover. Blumhouse partnered with Peacock to secure the rights for an entire trilogy. It may be a safe bet that the follow up film, The Exorcist: Deceiver, will be heading straight to steaming, because fans are not going to be deceived into heading out to the cinemas for anything resembling this pathetic film.
Scream Score: 4.5/10