Deliver Us from Evil
I'm a big fan of director Scott Derrickson's previous efforts The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Sinister, and this appears to have the best of both worlds: the procedural elements that made Emily Rose a standout and the demonic scares of Sinister. Unfortunately, they turn out to be two great tastes that don't taste very good together, sort of a Reese's Fiberglass Insulation Cup.
Eric Bana is Ralph Sarchie, a real-life NYPD detective who gets embroiled in cases involving possible supernatural elements. Edgar Ramirez is pretty great as an unconventional priest who joins forces with Sarchie to take on a disturbing case. It's almost worth seeing the movie just for him, but not quite. It's fun seeing Joel McHale turn up as Sarchie's partner and the movie might have benefited from more of him and his comic energy, he scores a couple of chuckles in an otherwise humorless, turgid movie and also plays a reasonably convincing tough guy.
Like most demonic possession movies that aren't The Exorcist, it has a very familiar feel (which I never would have expected to say when talking about a movie in which Joel McHale has a knife fight with the devil). There's lots of darkness and screaming and demonic voices and all that sort of hoo-ha, and it all feels like lukewarm leftovers. It does that thing that a lot of horror movies try to do but very few do well where it tries to make classic rock seem sinister (in this case The Doors) and ends up just making the proceedings even sillier than they might have been without the constant references. If the movie knew how silly it all was it might be worth a look, but it plays everything so po-faced that it practically borders on self-parody. Disappointing.
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