The Pope’s Exorcist Review The Pope’s Exorcist trailer has Russell Crowe dealing with demonic possessions in Rome

Imagine a buddy cop movie where a grizzled maverick detective, whose cunning exterior masks past trauma from a shooting gone wrong, is paired with a rookie cop on a new case that turns out to involve corruption. . . . Oh, and he also has problems with those pencil sharpeners at city hall who don’t have time for his unorthodox ways. I understand? Well, imagine now they’re not policemen, they’re priests. In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus SanctiYou’re watching a Buddy Priest movie.

Russell Crowe has a lot of fun playing the eponymous exorcist, and director Julius Avery’s film is about how okay you are with that central performance, which forces Crowe to always speak Italian or English with an Italian accent. this piece inside The Simpsons where Homer fantasizes about the life of an organized crime boss (“Very good!”). Attention Universal Studios: Next time you decide to reboot Super Mario Bros.Don’t call Chris Pratt, get on Big Russ and his moped.

The rest of the cast is of variable quality (thanks to the pig actor whose presence later allows Crowe to say “you own the pig!”), but there’s no denying that Ralph Ineson (the green knight) as the voice of Asmodeus the Demon, and there’s certainly logic in casting Franco Nero (the lead role in dozens of Detective stories AND cops film) as the pope. Still, it’s basically Crowe’s show, and engagement tends to falter when he’s not around, and most of the narrative pacing isn’t surprising if you’ve seen at least one film before. Maybe there’s an image that doesn’t appear to be copied from canon, and to avoid spoilers, we’ll just say “naked blood explosion” and leave it at that. At least the filmmakers had the decency to craft a nice ’80s playlist for the soundtrack with a proper sense of faith (choice cuts include The Cult’s “She Sells Sanctuary,” Violent Femmes’ “Gone Daddy Gone,” and ” We Care A Lot” by Who Else? No More Faith).

It could be argued that the film functions as an endorsement of the dubious career of the real father Gabriele Amorth, a man who has denounced yoga as satanic and claimed to have performed more than 70,000 exorcisms during his career, mostly on women. they were more vulnerable than men because “the devil wants to use them to reach men as Eve did with Adam”. If the film weren’t so ridiculous, the script’s repeated positive references to Amorth’s autobiographical works might leave a bad taste in my mouth. But ironically, for a film about some, some faith, this papal fiction is too silly to feel anything other than amusing disbelief.