Release Date: August 20, 2004
Starring: Stellan Skarsgård, Izabella Scorupco, Remy Sweeney
Directed by: Renny Harlin
Written by: Alexi Hawley
Distributed by: Warner Brothers
MPAA Rating: R (strong violence and gore, disturbing images and rituals, sexual content, language)
At times, Exorcist: The Beginning, the prequel to 1973’s The Exorcist, is an interesting character study while at others, it’s a bloody shock-fest. In other words, it takes a little bit of what made the original film good and mixes it with what drove its uninspired sequels into the ground. It has a human side and a good amount of supernatural intrigue, and at the same time, it can’t help but resort to senselessly gory content. It’s worth watching if you’ve been waiting a long time for a decent continuation of the Exorcist series, but it’s not necessarily for those who can’t stand horror movies fueled by shock value alone.
The story is set years before the original, with Lancaster Merrin (played in The Exorcist by Max von Sydow and here by Stellan Skarsgård) traveling to East Africa to investigate a recently discovered church that the Vatican has no record of. He’s a former priest, having lost his faith after a tragic event during World War II, and he has his doubts that the mysterious church in Africa is cursed with an incredible evil, as the locals say it is. What he finds inside the ancient building disturbs him, though, and he begins to investigate its origin and the strange and violent occurrences happening all around him.
The church actually seems to hold the soul of Satan himself, and many people who come close to the building start to behave sort of like Linda Blair’s character in the first Exorcist. But that’s about the only comparison to be made between this film and the original, since each has very different intentions. The Exorcist scared us out of our socks by focusing on characters that felt very familiar to us, namely the little girl (Blair) and her mother, and turned it a frightening story about a family’s struggle with the demon possessing their daughter, and the priest trying to help them.
Exorcist: The Beginning, meanwhile, has us look down a totally different path, centering its attention on Father Merrin, the aging priest from the original who came in to help with the exorcism towards the end. It’s about his personal struggle -- we learn he was once a loyal Catholic priest but has now left the church and become an alcoholic after experiencing the unthinkable during the Holocaust. It turns out that it will actually take the Devil himself to open Merrin’s eyes again and bring him back to his faith, and it’s this large piece of the character’s history that makes this prequel worth watching.
Stellan Skarsgård not only has the look of a young Max von Sydow, but he plays the part of Merrin quite well. You can feel the pain in his eyes as he recalls what a German soldier made him do during the war, and you can tell how torn up and hopeless he feels before he starts to believe the ancient church he is investigating is associated with a higher power. He drinks like a fish and knows it’s not good for him, and he tries to woo an attractive female doctor (played by Isabella Scorupco) he meets in Africa, something no Catholic priest would ever do. It’s an intriguing performance to watch, one that will have the viewer wondering whether his doubts will leave him in time.
The problem, though, is that director Renny Harlin (brought in by Warner Brothers to replace the previous director, Paul Schrader, and ordered to give the film more gore) gives too much screen time to blood and disturbing violence. In the 1973 film, the gore was indeed shocking and perhaps over the top, but it wasn’t gratuitous; it added to the sheer terror of the film, one aspect of the terrible demon inside the little girl. For Exorcist: The Beginning, that type of violence works at certain points but it becomes excessive at others, to a level where the movie loses some credibility.
We don’t need to see an extensive scene of a young boy being torn apart by hyenas, a rotting human corpse with its insides hanging out, or a stillborn baby covered in maggots, for instance. There are also a few too many sequences meant only to startle the audience. These parts mean little to the story and could have been hinted at or lifted altogether. At times like these, the movie comes dangerously close to being another mindless, brainless horror movie.
Some of the violence helps the story, though. We do, for example, need to see the cruel violence of Father Merrin’s flashback, so we understand why he left the Catholic church. And it’s not excessive to see what happens to a group of tribal priests who try to exorcise the demon from a boy (Remy Sweeney), because it builds on the character of the demon itself, making Merrin’s battle all the more terrifying.
Overall, though, Harlin would have been better off leaving a lot of it out. Exorcist: The Beginning isn’t unworthy of being the prelude to the original Exorcist, but its mistakes and excessive violence keep it from reaching the same level as that classic. If watched, this movie is best seen as a film about one man’s struggle with religious faith, not demonic highlight reel filled with blood and gore.
-- Andy Zientek (zfilm@earthlink.net)