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A half century ago, the great William Friedkin<\/a> directed \u201cThe Exorcist,\u201d blowing box-office records and audiences\u2019 minds. Now David Gordon Green, not content with mining the \u201cHalloween\u201d franchise for a trilogy of uneven follow-ups, has returned to visit the same fate on one of the highest-grossing films of the 1970s. Kicking off with \u201cThe Exorcist: Believer,\u201d this latest recycling project will continue with \u201cThe Exorcist: Deceiver,\u201d planned for 2025. No word yet on the third.<\/p>\n If your main gripe with the original was its preoccupation with a single victim and the dogma of just one religious denomination, then this overpopulated sequel has you covered. Clearly believing that more is more, Green and Peter Sattler\u2019s screenplay (which ignores the intervening franchise entries) gives us double the possessed, more than triple the faiths and a passel of enthusiastic exorcists. Keep them straight if you can.<\/p>\n The setup is swiftly efficient. Thirteen years after losing his pregnant wife in a Haitian earthquake, Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.) and his daughter, Angela (Lidya Jewett), are settled in Georgia. Aside from tolerating a grumpy neighbor (Ann Dowd) and her complaints about Victor\u2019s trash can management, the two seem happy enough. Then Angela and her friend Katherine (Olivia O\u2019Neill) head into the woods for some spiritual hanky-panky, returning three days later with blank memories and disturbing behaviors. Bring on the holy water!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Measured against the often mediocre standards of today\u2019s glut of reboots and reimaginings, \u201cBeliever\u201d is slickly professional, its young performers more than up to the task. It\u2019s also disappointingly, if unsurprisingly, cautious, gesturing only wanly toward the original\u2019s potent weave of puberty, religion and corporeal abuse. While no one is asking for lazy reruns of the infamous masturbation scene or that corkscrewing noggin<\/a> (though both are hinted at here), there are plenty of ways for a filmmaker to till such fertile thematic soil. Instead, Green contents himself with inconsequential tinkering, like switching the gender of the first film\u2019s evil entity. Shame on you if you assumed all demons were male.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Injecting a welcome dash of this-is-how-it\u2019s-done acting, Dowd (whose character will reveal hidden spiritual depths) and Ellen Burstyn (reprising her role as Chris MacNeil, the original victim\u2019s now-estranged mother), allow the film to take an occasional breath. Burstyn\u2019s inclusion, though, is narratively clumsy, a weak attempt to punch up familial pain that the new film fatally dilutes. Confining her to a hospital bed for much of the movie \u2014 as Green did with Jamie Lee Curtis in \u201cHalloween Kills\u201d (2021)<\/a> \u2014 only underscores the film\u2019s paucity of fresh ideas.<\/p>\n As for Green, his fondness for cinematic threesomes makes me nostalgic for his first<\/a> three features<\/a>, all made before he was 30 and one of which, \u201cAll the Real Girls,\u201d<\/a> won a 2003 Sundance Special Jury Prize for \u201cemotional truth.\u201d These dreamy, small-town reflections on love and survival, set among the crumbling textile mills and deserted railroad tracks of the rural South, revealed an uncommon talent for identifying the drama of decline. That patience and sensitivity have now been sacrificed to the cannibalism of recycled ideas; and while I don\u2019t begrudge him his success, I do miss the filmmaker he used to be.<\/p>\n The Exorcist: Believer<\/strong>
Rated R for blasphemous behavior and detachable toenails. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n