If you need evidence of how there’s still plenty of room for improvement in the world of computer generated effects in movies, don’t bother looking at the best examples of the craft; look at second rate productions like Exorcist: The Beginning, where cartoon hyenas give the last laugh to old style special effects.
Poor Stellan Skarsgard looks as world weary and lost as his character, lapsed Catholic priest Lancaster Merrin, in this prequel to the original, which is so far below his substantial talents that you’ve got to wonder why he’d settle for script like this. There’s nothing wrong with a good actor slumming it in a horror movie now and again, but this is an embarrassment. Granted, it’s more the piecing together of the film that’s painful rather than the screenplay, which is nothing worse than generic horror movie stuff. So perhaps the Swedish Skarsgard got involved not realizing that his fellow northern European, Finish director Renny Harlin, would make such a mess of things.
And a mess this movie is. Scene after scene lurches harshly from one cut to the next, often leaving jaw dropping continuity gaps – Merrin witnesses a horrific scene, then an instant later he’s hopping into a jeep and heading off to do something without showing the slightest evidence that he’s just been through a hellish experience. It’s as if Harlin made himself an even more tiresome three hour marathon and then was instructed to cut a third of it out, regardless of what that would do to the look of the film, let alone its continuity.
Set in 1949 Africa, Merrin, a lapsed priest whose Second World War experiences turned him off religion altogether, is working as a dishevelled archaeologist. He’s hired – in a scene that starts with an awful cartoon-like CGI rendition of Cairo – to find a mysterious object in Kenya. Apparently, a Catholic church has been found buried in the countryside – it’s in pristine condition and appears to date from 500 AD, fully a thousand years before Christianity came to the region. Needless to say, Merrin finds all sorts of crazy things going on once he arrives, complete with crows that like to live underground, Looney Tunes quality hyenas on the prowl, and one of the most shallow and stupidest portrayals of Africans to make the big screen since the 1930s. But don’t worry, there’s one good Christian among the locals; he’ll have none of their mumbo jumbo.
Exorcist: The Beginning is a plodding mess of a movie, with very few frights, and those that are there are all timeworn clichés. At 114 minutes, it’s at least 20 minutes too long, but shortening this movie wouldn’t likely lift it out of the garbage heap, as there’s just too much wrong here – a dull storyline, plodding pacing, poor CGI effects, lame script full of bad dialogue, melodramatic flashbacks, and even bad makeup. You don’t need to measure this one against the classic original to find fault with it; this movie doesn’t even compare favourably to Harlin’s goofy but at least tense and sometimes shocking Deep Blue Sea.
I watched this movie with a preview audience of the general public – people who tend to be pretty forgiving since they got in for free and are ‘lucky’ enough to be seeing the movie in advance of its release – and there were a lot more snickers than sounds of fright, nervousness or enthusiasm as the movie unfolded. If you thought the Exorcist franchise might come back to life 14 years after the modestly well received The Exorcist III, think again.
