23% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 193 reviews)
Runtime: An overlong almost two hours
Directed by: David Gordon Green, although it's more like “Directed” by
Starring: A bunch of actors who deserved better, especially Ellen Burstyn
From: Universal/Morgan Creek/Blumhouse, who all should be ashamed
PAZUZU DIES TONIGHT! My apologies to Letterboxd mutual Christian D. for stealing his one line review but it literally made me laugh out loud. Like many, I wasn't happy with Halloween Kills. That entire reboot trilogy wasn't great shakes although they look far better compared to Believer. Also like many, I was wary of Believer-the trailers did not look promising and there was bad buzz even before release. However, this replacing Expend4bles as the worst theatrical movie I saw in '23—truly staggering; I was stunned at how much I loathed the film.
To clarify, the OG Friedkin classic is still utterly terrifying and a treatise on faith as an innocent girl is possessed and it takes a priest questioning his own beliefs to try and vanquish the foe. III is pretty good despite production interference, I might check out Exorcist: The Beginning and Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist later in the month & II is tremendously weird & misguided but was still fascinating and had such merits as a sweaty Richard Burton and a decent Morricone score. This, however... Ann Dowd's character is muddled at times yet I did enjoy her performance. The child actors did their best—Dowd did seem to try her best w/ her character arc. Whatever good elements may have been present here were drowned out by all the vomit & bile.
Why did it take the power of Christ to compel me to not walk out of the cinema before the end credits? What an utter disaster of a story. I mean, there's too much antagonism and I'm sure various people will take umbrage with both how the atheist is portrayed and especially how the fundamentalist Christian family is made to look like several nice, typical children and hateful, ogre adults. More than one Letterboxd mutual is a proud Christian to the point that a Cross symbol is in their profile name; I imagine they will be offended that this was in a purported sequel to a classic film where faith is so critical.
By the end it is patently obvious why the subtitle is Believer; that general idea could have worked but not how they presented it here. Too often I thought “WTF?” or “what is this editing?! What's going on!?” so I thought this was just poorly made & paced. It did not have too many of the modern tropes that I can't stand, such as “characters die, only to return despite suffering obviously fatal injury”. However, there IS “a legacy character is miserable”. Poor Ellen Burstyn; among other things, I do have to mention a line of dialogue that got plenty of attention on Twitter for the wrong reasons: Chris MacNeil bitched about The Patriarchy because she wasn't allowed to see Regan's exorcism! I wish I was joking; as if she would WANT to watch something so traumatic, but that was just insulting to Chris, Father Merrin and Father Karras for a number of reasons.
The biggest sin of this Exorcist sequel: somehow, they found a way to have this contain zero scares and it wasn't done on purpose. It takes talent to accidentally screw up that badly! The original still terrifies half a century later no matter your religious viewpoint, the third has some great ones (including one that has become an all-timer) and even The Heretic had some. Believer did not inspire terror; it was more like aggravation then boredom as I waited to see the possessions and was dumbfounded that even those scenes were lame. The third act in particular was a disaster and once you realize what the apparent messages of the film are—many will be upset while I was just shocked the story was just so fundamentally bad and general filmmaking so lousy that the exorcism moments were both sleep-inducing and amazingly bungled.
This is a problem with modern filmmaking in general but when I remembered that the entire Halloween reboot trilogy was full of baffling and nonsensical plot decisions, then it was even worse here... not only is it incredibly unlikely I'll ever see any sequel to this film (if it ever happens), I just might be done w/ David Gordon Green in general.
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