The Pope’s Exorcist is inspired by the true story of Father Gabriele Amorth, the Pope’s personal exorcist. It stars Russell Crowe as Amorth in an admittedly engaging performance despite a thick Italian accent. While Crowe’s performance saves it from purgatory, the rest of the movie doesn’t completely attain salvation.
Crowe plays Amorth as more of an action hero rather than your typical priest. He delivers wisecracks, drinks whiskey, and rides a scooter everywhere he goes. In the beginning, Amorth is in trouble with his superiors after performing an exorcism in which the demon enters a pig, and Amorth subsequently kills the pig.
He’s summoned by the Pope (Franco Nero) to a small village in Spain where a mother (Alex Essoe) and her two children (Laurel Marsden and Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) reside in an old abbey which was left to them after her husband and their father passed away. The son hasn’t spoken a word since his father’s death, and the daughter is a typical rebellious teenage girl.
The boy becomes possessed, and Amorth confronts the demon with his assistant (Daniel Zovatto). The demon tries to attack them psychologically while it shouts out a stream of blasphemous obscenities and tests the two priests’ faith. Amorth remains strong, while the assistant is susceptible to the demon’s methods.
You won’t see much in The Pope’s Exorcist that you won’t see in many other movies about possession, such as The Exorcist or The Conjuring. Any attempts at discovering how the Vatican works and how they assign priests to their duties are only surface-level material.
Crowe is sufficient as Amorth, and many of his scenes work, such as his self-promotion when he tries to persuade the assisting priest to read some of the books he’s written. “They’re good books!” exclaims Amorth. Crowe is the anchor that holds this film together, but the rest of the movie suffers from insufficient intrigue to suggest whether or not the boy will get free from his possession.
Plus, the ending comes down to a series of events that take us further out of the real world that this movie supposedly revolves around and puts us straight into something bewildering.
I wanted to admire this movie much more than I did. Any film that is supposedly inspired by the files of a real-life priest should have material much more insightfully sumptuous, but the results only produce just another horror feature that fails to put the fear of God into us.
Grade: B-
(Rated R for violent content, language, sexual references, and some nudity.)
