When most successful actors hit their middle-age these days, they seem to take the Liam Neeson approach to acting and suddenly become a grizzled action hero in order to gave some fun while still keeping that cash coming in – however, Russell Crowe isn’t most successful actors.
While his contemporaries are training in the gym in order to convince as highly trained brawlers with very particular sets of skills, Crowe seems perfectly content to slap on a priest’s collar and bellow at pure evil in a string of slick exorcism films. As initially confounding as this may be (the dude from Gladiator fighting demons, really?), Crowe has just turned up in Joshua John Miller’s The Exorcism, his second exorcist-themed movie since The Pope’s Exorcist which is due a sequel fairly sharpish.
However, while this budding franchise is more traditional, devil-baiting fare, The Exorcism chooses to go full meta by casting the burly Crowe as an actor playing an exorcist who then comes into contact with actual evil. Hey, whatever, Russell – you do you, baby.
Anthony Miller is a washed up former actor who, after his wife’s death from cancer and the fact that he suffered child abuse as an alter boy, hit the bottle super hard before moving on to obliterate his career with drugs. However, now on the wagon wnd diligently sticking to his meds, Miller may have found a shot at redemption in the form of The Georgetown Project, a new horror remake whose unscrupulous director hopes that all that past trauma will play great when the actor is cast as a doubt ridden priest.
While Miller tackles a role that, at best, could be described as incredibly triggering, his conflicted, hipster daughter, Lee, is along for this Bumpy ride after being hired as her father’s personal assistant after being kicked out of school. However, as the director pushes Miller’s buttons in order to get the required performance, the strain soon starts to show.
But wait, is Miller dangerously close to tumbling off the wagon with disastrous circumstances – or has something far more sinister taken hold of the struggling actor? After bouts of sleepwalking and muttering shit in Latin makes Lee think her father is close to breaking, it seems that the cursed production is way more cursed than anyone could have possibly imagined as Miller is seemingly fighting off the effects of a full blown demonic possession.
As he takes to the bottle once again and his behavior veers from erratic to downright deadly, the division between possession and addict blurs significantly – can Lee, her starlet girlfriend, Blake, and the kindly father Conor manage to pull Anthony back from the brink before this demon does some damage his soul won’t walk away from?
Sometimes a film comes out that you sense is desperately trying to do something different to the point that you’re willing it to succeed even if it can’t quite nail the point it’s trying to make and while The Exorcism ultimately stumbles on the path to its lofty ambitions, the fact that these guys really fucking tried is something I can’t help but appreciate. Director Joshua John Miller, himself a former actor (he was the tragic Homer in Katheryn Bigelow’s Near Dark), has so many things he obviously wants to say, and yet the movie only has a run time of 95 minutes to do so – so much like Anthony Miller’s cluttered soul, there’s one too many thoughts buzzing around inside the movie’s skull.
The fact that the movie addresses Miller’s childhood molestation seems to be a good (if naturally uncomfortable) place for the movie to hang its hat as countless reports of pedophilia in the church makes faith tough to come by even if you wasn’t in an exorcism movie, but them the film also is keen to try and marry up the similarities between being caught in the throes of addiction with having your soul being treated as a boogie board by a nefarious, satanic entity. While this is also an admirable attempt to add some gravitas in a sub-genre that’s getting noticably more flashy in its presentation, the fact that the script also wants to be a weird, meta adaptation of the making of the 1973 classic, The Exorcist simply tips the boat a little too far over.
It’s a shame, because any two of these points could have provided an increasingly original take on aggressive exorcising and it’s the riffs of the production of legendary horror film that ultimately fascinates me the most. Miller (undoubtedly a nod to actor Jason Miller) is pushed to uncomfortable lengths by Adam Goldberg’s boundaries-ignoring director in a way that apes William Friedkin’s infamous bouts of directorial fuckery. Aside from that, the movie is set in Georgetown, there’s a four poster bed, a girl with a clawed visage, a religious advisor on hand in the form of David Hyde Pierce’s savy priest and the set for this film within a film even has a refrigerated room to really drive things home.
However, while all these things are legitimately diverting for anyone who is up on their Exorcist lore, it does actually make a lot of the tropes of the genre actually feel a tiny bit fresher than they have done over the past few decades and the various bouts of spine cracking contortionism and shocking acts of self harm don’t just feel like the filmmakers derivatively paying their dues. Hell, there’s even some remarkably well judged jump scares in there that take some tonal cues from that legendary, out of nowhere, jump scare from Exorcist III, but the cluttered nature of the script’s wish list ends up thwarting many of the movie’s aims.
However, holding all together, bless him, is Crowe, who curious, late stage obsession with demon smiting continues to be more fun than the actual movies it’s provided. While the actor thankfully just steers shy of digging out his Mr Hyde shtick from the Tom Cruise Mummy film, he isn’t shy when it comes to embracing some of the more uncomfortable truths of fame and addiction; and failing that, he still manages to prison shiv a demon with a crucifix – so that’s nice…
While falling noticably short of the ambitious tasks it’s set itself, The Exorcism still is a fairly harmless watch even if a lot of its ideas are presented only half-baked (Ryan Simpkins’ budding romance with Chole Bailey, for example, feels mostly like an after thought), however, while I appreciate what the filmmakers were shooting for, I’ll personally be praying harder for the second Pope’s Exorcist movie to come out before I declare the Russell Crowe exorcism movie a legitimate sub-genre.
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