Exorcist: The Beginning (2004) Warner Bros./Horror RT: 114 minutes Rated R (strong violence and gore, disturbing images and rituals, language, some sexual dialogue) Director: Renny Harlin Screenplay: Alexi Hawley Music: Trevor Rabin Cinematography: Vittorio Storaro Release date: August 20, 2004 (US) Cast: Stellan Skarsgard, Izabella Scorupco, James D’Arcy, Ralph Brown, Julian Wadham, Andrew French, Ben Cross, Remy Sweeney, David Bradley, Alan Ford, Antonie Kamerling, James Bellamy. Box Office: $41.8 million (US)/$78 million (World)
Rating: *
When the story behind a movie is more interesting than the actual movie, you know you’re in trouble. Such is the case with Exorcist: The Beginning, an uninspired prequel to the 1973 horror classic about Catholic guilt filtered through a possessed preteen girl.
Initially, John Frankenheimer (Ronin) was supposed to direct this fourth movie, but he bowed out shortly before his death in 2002. Paul Schrader (Cat People) was brought in to replace him. The producers, however, weren’t satisfied with the movie he was making. He was going for something more psychological; the producers wanted a more audience-pleasing horror film, one with bloody violence and cheap jump scares. Schrader was fired and Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2) was brought in. At the producers’ insistence, the script was rewritten and most of the movie was reshot. This delayed its release for a year (it was originally scheduled for a summer 2003 release).
The studio declined to screen Exorcist: The Beginning until the night before its release. This is a textbook example of a bad omen. Sure enough, the reviews were largely negative and its box office take was far less than studio heads anticipated. As for Schrader’s version, he finished it and it was released the following year as Dominion: The Prequel to The Exorcist (see next review).
There’s plenty wrong with Exorcist: The Beginning, but its biggest problem by far is that it’s a crashing bore. The storyline, such as it is, is mildly interesting in parts. Writer Alexi Hawley, working from a screenplay by William Wisher Jr. and Caleb Carr, throws a few good ideas into the mix but never develops them in a satisfactory way. What we’re left with is a collection of plot points that barely hold together. What’s more, Exorcist: The Beginning moves at a turtle’s pace. Sometimes it stops dead in its tracks. There’s no real momentum. There are a few okay moments but these are outweighed by too many periods of inactivity.
Exorcist: The Beginning opens on a bloody, body-strewn battlefield where a terrified priest is wading through the carnage. He spots a dead priest clutching a small idol in his hand (yes, it’s Pazuzu!). When he tries to take it, the priest briefly comes back to life to stop him.
It then cuts to Cairo, Egypt in 1949 where an antiquities collector (Cross, Chariots of Fire) approaches priest-turned-archeologist Lankester Merrin (Skarsgard, Insomnia) and asks him to go to a site in Africa and retrieve some relic from a Christian church that was recently uncovered. It doesn’t make sense that the church was built circa 500 A.D., long before Christianity came to Africa. Merrin goes to the site and enters the church with Father Francis (D’Arcy, Agent Carter), a priest sent by the Vatican to ensure that the church isn’t desecrated in any way. Too late! Somebody did that before the church was buried.
Let’s get right to it. The church was built on top of another church, a pagan temple to be exact. In the temple is a large statue of Pazuzu. The Christian church was built and immediately buried to hide all evidence of the massacre that took place on that spot 1500 years prior. It’s also suggested that it’s the spot where Lucifer landed after God ejected him from Heaven.
Okay, these are some good ideas but Harlin doesn’t do anything interesting with them. Instead, we get a story about a little boy from the village who might be possessed. Herein lies one of this movie’s biggest flaws. We know from Exorcist II: The Heretic that Merrin performed an exorcism on Kokumo, a little African boy possessed by Pazuzu. Exorcist: The Beginning doesn’t follow this part of the Exorcist saga as previously laid out in the second film. This lack of continuity is a stumbling block from which Harlin’s movie never recovers. I have to ask, did the makers of Exorcist: The Beginning actually see any of the Exorcist movies? Going by this, I’d have to say not.
There’s also a serious lack of character development. The closest we get to fully developed characters are Merrin and the site doctor Sarah (Scorupco, GoldenEye). Merrin is on leave from the church; he’s undergoing a crisis of faith, a result of the Nazi horrors he witnessed during WWII. Specifically, he was forced to aid Nazi soldiers in executing random people from his village in retaliation for the murder of one of their own. Sarah bears a certain tattoo on her arm; she’s a concentration camp survivor, the only member of her family to make it out. Something terrible happened to her while she was there. The rest of the characters are just there.
The only thing that stands out about Exorcist: The Beginning is the grotesque imagery. It’s an ugly movie. We get to see a stillborn baby covered in maggots and a child torn apart by wild hyenas. Hyenas show up a lot in this movie. So do flies and crows. One repulsive character has rotten teeth and pus-oozing boils on his face. A little girl gets shot through the head; this shot is repeated a few times. There’s also a bloody fight between British soldiers and African villagers near the end of the movie. And, of course, there are many sacrilegious images and an exorcism at the end. It all amounts to a big pile of nothing.
The acting in Exorcist: The Beginning is, for the most part, serviceable. Skarsgard does a pretty good job but he had something to work with. Scorupco is fairly wooden. Alan Ford (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) overacts shamelessly as the guy with the boils. He’s the chief excavator or something like that; he mostly gets drunk and makes unwanted passes at the sole female character.
Harlin is capable of much better. I like much of his early work like A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, Die Hard, Cliffhanger and The Long Kiss Goodnight. I even liked The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. He’s also done a few lame movies like Cutthroat Island, Driven, The Covenant and Exorcist: The Beginning. It’s the worst installment of the Exorcist series. It’s also one of the weakest horror movies I’ve ever seen. File this one under M for mortal sin.
