Despite the fact that there seems to be a precious little amount original ideas when it comes to exorcism films, filmmakers still seem to be eager to throw their hats into the satanic ring in order to push the boundaries of what William Friedkin managed with the peerless The Exorcist. However, if anyone has past experience at trying something beyond all the bed restraints, contorting and croaky voices, it’s Scott Derrickson whose previous form had him attach a legal drama plot to all the horror with 2005’s The Exorcism Of Emily Rose.
However, this time Derrickson has returned with Deliver Us From Evil, a seemingly true story that not only blends the typical, Exorcist shenanigans with the kind of cop drama seen in the likes of The French Connection, but also stands as a rare foray into horror for uber producer Jerry Bruckheimer. Can the combined power of Christ and the NYPD compel evil to take a walk, or does true darkness recognise no jurisdiction?
After a 2010 flashback that sees a trio of Marines deployed in Iraq fall foul of some malevolent force, we zip ahead by three years to focus on understandably serious NYPD Special Operations Sergeant Ralph Sarchie. While Sarchie is a gifted cop with a sixth sense for wrong doing that his adrenaline junkie partner has dubbed “the radar”, the constant trawl through the scum, drugs and dead babies he seems to see on a daily basis is steadily grinding him down. While it isn’t affecting his police work, it is starting to eat into his family life and when his wife, Jen, reveals she’s expecting a second child, Sarchie worries about the darkness swirling within him.
However, there’s plenty of darkness on the outside too and after checking in on back to back cases featuring a wife beater, a bizarre suicide of a man drinking paint thinner and an instance of a woman suddenly throwing her young child into a trench surrounding the Lion enclosure at the local zoo. Sarchie realises that all of these occurrences are connected when he finds that a mysterious, hooded figure has something to do with all three brutal acts and dedicates his energies to finding out who he is.
An unlikely form of help is at hand in the form of Jesuit priest Mendoza who keeps popping up periodically when things seem to be getting too crazy. Even though the hard bitten Sarchie states that he “outgrew” his religious upbringing at the age of twelve, he can’t quite shake the concepts that Mendoza keeps telling him and the deeper and deeper he goes into this case, the more unnatural it blatently becomes.
But are we seriously talking about demonic possession here? After discovering that the ominous figure that’s seemingly spreading evil about is a former Marine by the name of Mick Santino, could this not be an extreme case of PTSD that’s gotten horribly out of control?
You can tell that in the wake of getting to play with a heftier budget during the making of The Day The Earth Stood Still remake, Derrickson was eager to take what he had learned and try to add it to yet another attempt to put a new spin on all the usual exorcism tropes. However, while Deliver Us From Evil has a fair amount in common with The Exorcism Of Emily Rose, it also shares a surprising amount of DNA with his DTV Hellraiser entry, Inferno, which also trod the line between demonic horror and a noir-esque crime procedural. Of course, here he riffs more on William Peter Blatty than Clive Barker, but you can tell that the director is dedicated to more cops and Demons stories up on the screen.
Is he successful though? Well, yes and no. Building a more down to earth, police presence around the act of demonic possession isn’t exactly new as movies as diverse as Exorcist III and The First Power have tackled the union in very different ways, but when it comes to building a crime soaked world that seems to be utterly godless before any possessed people show up, Derrickson is obviously looking to use David Fincher’s Se7en as a visual template. However, while the movie has all the grime, grit and satanic mood boards you could possibly hope for – we meet Sarchie kneeling over the body of a dead newborn baby for fuck’s sake – the movie just can’t pull free of its influences.
Simply put, despite the claims that it’s based on a true story, the film doesn’t actually have anything new to offer either in its exorcism parts or its cop bits. While your opinion may vary about using wartime PTSD to cover for possession, it isn’t significantly different from the correlation that other demonic movies have made with mental health in the past and it still ends with your typical scene where a believer and a man with wobbly faith yell bible passages as someone while the lights go crazy.
Elsewhere, we find the cop stuff equally predictable as Eric Bana’s grim hero bickers with Olivia Munn’s wife character about the stresses of his job and even has a gung-ho partner in the form of Joel McHale who seems to own no clothing other than an endless supply of Alice In Chains t-shirts. Not to get too spoilerish, but you can pretty much guess what happens to each of these characters once you apply basic cop movie logic to them (kidnapped or dead, basically) and while it’s certainly watchable, the fact that it’s fairly derivative of not one, but two genres is a bit of a letdown.
Still, Derrickson definitely knows how to shoot a gloomy scene and stage a healthy jump scare, and Bana is also as professional as always even though his Bronx accent suggests that he’s getting paid by the vowel. However, the movie tends to work best whenever it focuses on either Édgar Ramirez’s unfeasibly cool priest who promotes the powers of good while clad in a leather jacket, knocking back booze and puffing on a cigarette; or Sean Harris’ typically feral Santino that once again sees the intense actor bore a hole through the screen while using barely any dialogue. There’s a neat thread of the movie using the music of The Doors to signify the issues concerning the supernatural, but while we need no excuse to listen to the works of Jim Morrison and co., once again I can’t help but be reminded that Fallen did something similar with The Rolling Stones.
Maybe I’m being too harsh on Deliver Us From Evil’s tendency to reuse well worn concepts, but if I’m being honest, I was expecting much, much more from the man who gave us the stark shocks of Sinister. Still, it’s watchable enough and if you are somehow new to both the genres of exorcisms and gritty cop movies, then you’ll probably do just fine with it. However, while playing the hits of previous movies can be a double-edged sword, Deliver Us From Evil manages to cut itself one time too many to truly stand out from the cross waving, Latin speaking, casting out crowd.
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