Prequel Lacks Bite Without Linda

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday October 28, 2004

Sandra Hall

EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING Directed by Renny Harlin Story by William Wisher and Caleb Carr Screenplay by Alexi Hawley Rated MA Cinemas everywhere

What's the point of re-visiting The Exorcist if you can't have Linda Blair? I know it's been done already. The novel's author, William Peter Blatty, tried it himself when he directed a Blair-less sequel several years ago, and the result has its fans. But for most of us, the story's power revolves around Blair's Regan - or rather, revolves with her, thanks to the notorious 360 degree neck swivel, which was a highlight of William Friedkin's original film, now 30 years old.

Yet this is franchise-mad Hollywood, with its passion for re-makes, re-jigs and re-envisagings. Another Exorcist derivative was inevitable, so we have the prequel.

The surprise is that it's directed by Renny Harlin who came on board only after Paul Schrader was sacked from the job. Schrader, with his introverted Calvinist sensibility, is said to have blunted the visceral impact of the version he shot with excess periods of reflection, so it was junked. There's none of that nonsense with Harlin, who could never be accused of thinking too much. His most recent work of note, The Deep Blue Sea, was an action movie more celebrated for gall than guile. Mysteriously, it became a hit, possibly because audiences were hugely entertained by the idea of being expected to swallow something so risible.

But Harlin is well connected. For one thing, he's able to retain the talents of the glowering Swedish actor, Stellan Skarsgard. Harlin is Finnish, so maybe it's a Northern thing. He also has Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now, Last Tango in Paris), one of the great names in cinematography. And with Skarsgard's brooding presence and Storaro's manipulations of light and shadow, you could almost be kidded into the illusion that you're being treated to a film with some pretensions to being taken seriously. Well, for the first two minutes, you could.

Skarsgard's role is that of Father Merrin, Max von Sydow's priest from the original. The script takes him back 25 years to Cairo in 1949, where he's staying having given up the priesthood in reaction to a Nazi atrocity he was powerless to prevent. We learn more about this via a set of remorselessly unfolding flashbacks. But for the moment, we're with Merrin in a bar, where he's crouched over a drink concentrating on being morose. His frowns, however, fail to deter a prosperous-looking stranger in a white suit (Ben Cross) who makes him an offer. He wants him to go to an archaeological dig in the Turkana region of Kenya and use his expertise in religious iconography to look for a sculpture secreted in a recently unearthed Byzantine church. Naturally Merrin says yes, bad mood or not. It's that kind of picture and in about three takes, he's on site, being introduced to the rest of the company, who include the alluring Dr Sarah Novack (ex-Bond girl Isabella Scorupco), the less than alluring local drunk (Alan Ford), and a young priest, Father Francis (James D'Arcy), who's been sent to Turkana by the Vatican.

As to why these events take place in Kenya rather than Turkey or the Middle East, I can only guess. Maybe Harlin and his writers were inspired by John Boorman. Although Boorman's Exorcist sequel, The Heretic, was one of his most leaden efforts, he did get a very cinematic locust plague out of the sequence he set in Ethiopia.

In emulation, perhaps, Harlin enlists an exotic array of wildlife to perform the devil's work - hyenas, ravens, bugs. Even butterflies are called up for demonic duty. But the human children are the ones you worry about. I realise it's a bit redundant at this late date to complain of the series' exploitation of innocents. But as if to compensate for Blair's absence, Harlin does lay on some very nasty scenes involving two young African boys caught up in the crossfire.

And there is a lot of it. Once the script's first casualty - narrative logic - is disposed of, the corpses rapidly begin piling up, having been hacked and shredded in ways which remind you that Harlin has also served time at the lower end of the horror movie market as director of one of the many sequels to A Nightmare on Elm Street. His special effects team also do a vivid line in pustular eruptions and even Storaro can't restrain him in his eagerness to give us a thorough inspection of the damage.

It's all sick-making rather than nerve-racking and unlike The Deep Blue Sea, completely bereft of all the rousingly ridiculous attributes which send you out feeling as if you've seen a good bad film.

Best to wait for the Schrader version, which should eventually surface on DVD.