The Pope's Exorcist movie review: Russell Crowe brings humour, gravitas in a mediocre horror film

In Julius Avery's supernatural horror film, The Pope's Exorcist, Russell Crowe dons the collar and robe of Father Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican's chief exorcist (which is a real, actual position) who is tasked by the Pope with confronting the forces of evil that threaten to invade the souls of the innocent. Gabriele Amorth, too, was a real man, and the movie is based on his own accounts of exorcisms that he claims to have performed during his tenure. It's 1987. An American family, consisting of a mother Julia (Alex Essoe), her teenage daughter Amy (Laurel Marsden), and 12-year-old son Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney), moves to a crumbling abbey in Spain left to them by Julia's husband and Amy and Henry's father who died a year earlier.

Julia's aim is to repair and restore the abbey, sell it, and move back to the US. While Amy is uncooperative, Henry is morose and has not spoken a word since the death of his father. The thing is, he was right there in the vehicle, in the back seat, when he saw his father being impaled in the accident. But if all that happened to him before Spain was bad enough, he is now going to be possessed by a particularly powerful demon. The construction works on the site inadvertently unearth the said entity, which speaks through Henry and demands the presence of "the priest."

No, the local priest Father Esquibel (Daniel Zovatto) will not do. It has to be Amorth. The film follows the Vatican-stamped exorcist directed by Papal authority to deal with the case as he investigates the possession of the boy and simultaneously tries to uncover a sinister truth that the Vatican has kept hidden for centuries.

The Pope's Exorcist has all the ingredients of a classic horror film — an old, spooky, and sprawling building, a possessed child, and of course, Russell Crowe in a priest's collar. But in the end, The Pope's Exorcist turns out to be a run-of-the-mill exorcism flick. Not only does it have nothing new to say about the genre, but it also does not justify the 'Exorcist' in the title.

The reason is, there are quite a few exorcism scenes here as you can expect, but none of them are very compelling, though there are a couple of half-hearted attempts to recreate, or perhaps pay homage to, a few scenes from that queen of exorcism movies, 1973's The Exorcist. But even with half a century of advancement in filmmaking and visual effects, The Pope's Exorcist ends up being a pale shadow of that William Friedkin film.

2014's Deliver Us from Evil came to my mind while watching this movie, which was an otherwise mediocre horror thriller but did serve an absolutely riveting exorcism sequence.

With the exception of Amorth, the characters in The Pope's Exorcist are thinly sketched, with little depth or nuance, making it hard to empathise with their plight or care about their fates. The atmosphere, with drab grey

However, amidst all of this mediocrity, there is one shining beacon of excellence, and that is Russell Crowe's performance as Father Gabriele Amorth. Crowe plays the role with casual good humour, and at the same time brings a sense of gravitas and intensity in a way only Crowe can. He is also, I expect, refreshingly different from most men of faith. Never preachy, possesses a gallows sense of humour ("Sugar is the work of devil," he says when offered some for his espresso shot), and is unfailingly kind. He is thus nothing like the real Amorth, who among other things said that yoga is satanic due to its association with the practice of Hinduism and belief in reincarnation, and that "all eastern religions are based on a false belief" and lead to evil "like Harry Potter."

But even Crowe is unable to save this movie. What could have been an intriguing exploration of faith, evil, and the shadowy workings of the Vatican ends up being a forgettable, by-the-numbers horror picture.

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