The first thing I want everyone to know about this movie. Save your time and cash and don't worry about it in the theater. It is really not worth a bit of that experience. Wait for the DVD. So let's get started.
As I sit here with a glass of whisky staring at my notes with a good night to sleep on what I just watched, something occurs to me. Deliver Us From Evil had a lot of excellent components and chances to do something really spectacular with it all and just doesn't do it. It almost feels like it didn't know what the hell it wanted to do so tried a bit of everything.
Deliver Us From Evil centers around Sgt. Ralph Sarchie (the name of the real life cop whom the events are supposedly based on and later became a demonologist). Sarchie is a by the numbers movie cop. He spends too much time at work, is distant from his wife and kid, damn good at what he does, has a special "radar" that leads him to crime, and has a dark guilt that weighs on him. Sarchie and his partner take a few cases over their shift that wind up being connected and have an eerie feel about them. I have to say the best thing about Deliver Us From Evil is the actors. Everyone is really giving it a good effort and it shows. Eric Bana and Joel McHale are believable bad ass cops. The only person in the cast who isn't really doing anything is Olivia Munn, she's totally pointless and hopefully she got a decent check for doing nothing.
The premise I described, in my opinion is very good and can be really fun. The problem is they do nothing new with it. Sarchie meets a priest who tries to tell him that a rambling crazy woman who threw her kid into a lion pit at the zoo is possessed by a demon. This leads into the standard nonbeliever becomes a believer character arc that you see in nearly all haunting or possession movies. It's almost enough to make you roll your eyes. If not for Eric Bana the character of Sarchie would just be terrible.
So now I will lead you through the movie experience, there may be spoilers. So if you really give a shit about this movie I'd turn back now like I should have at the box office.
Firstly, the scares. It's what we all come to the movie for. There is one good one that isn't even as scary as it should be due to lack of context at that moment, which I'll talk about in just a second. Tension in Deliver Us From Evil is in real short supply. Strap in for a ton of lazy jump scares all delivered by animals. It takes until maybe half way through the movie for anything wi th two legs to try and scare you. Though the best one is a scene where Sarchie is checking his daughter's room for a scratching sound and looks in a mirror only to see a bloody screaming man crawling over his sleeping child. This is on it's own fairly chilling, but add the context that the man he sees is a child molester/murderer that Sarchie beat to death years previously. Now that is some scary shit right there. Whoever wrote this though figured it would be better put in a cheap scare rather than build to something that should have been rather intense.
The acting. Like I mentioned before. I have nothing but positive things to say about this area. Eric Bana is great as a New York cop who's seen a lot of bad shit. He even looks the part very well. Joel McHale who plays his partner (who damn if the name escapes me right now) is also top notch as a funny and bad ass mofo. Edgar Ramirez plays a priest who eventually joins the two cops on their investigation and is the character I enjoyed the most. He's not some old coot priest that hangs on and can't do anything, he's a young guy who joined the priesthood after almost dying from drug overdose. He's got a bit too much of the Vulcan calm going on, but the character is a refreshing change.
Another great thing. The tone of this movie pulls no punches and is very very dark. The first time you meet Sgt. Sarchie, he is giving CPR to a dead infant he found in a trash can. This tells you already that Deliver Us From Evil is not fucking around. New York is rainy, dirty, dark and gloomy. People are thrown from buildings, bled out through major arteries, and corpses pop like overripe fruit. Why not, I'll even bring up the effects. They are awesome Everything looks good, from the practical to the CGI. I never once thought the makeup or anything was cheesy or phoned in.
A few things I really didn't know how to categorize that I didn't like about Deliver Us From Evil. There is one scene where Joel McHale encounters one of the possessed characters in a stairway carrying a hatchet. Instead of drawing a weapon and shooting him, McHale pulls two knives and has a knife fight in the stairway. While this scene is really well choreographed and bad ass, it makes no damn sense and really doesn't fit the tone of the movie. Another odd moment is our heroes are using a pair of thermal goggles that I'm pretty sure the Predator would be jealous of with moving reticules and distance information, that shit is almost science fiction. There are a also a ton of public domain sound effects, which is a small gripe, but still very lazy.
The last thing I will talk about though is the final scene of the movie. Sarchie and the Priest have perform a exorcism/interrogation of the main possessed bad guy. If the whole movie had been as creative as this one scene it might be one of the best movies of the year. There is a real struggle and sense of desperation in what the protagonists are doing there and it feels like a big deal. This whole scene may be worth renting it when Deliver Us From Evil comes out.
Overall... I'd have to say I recommend Deliver Us From Evil as a rental on a boring night. Not something you should run out and see. Even if you never see it, you aren't missing much. It gets a few things right, but the all the shitty jump scares at the beginning really turned me against the whole thing. I kind of wonder what happened to just being scary instead of throwing shit at the screen for 90 minutes?
I guess all there is left to do now is finish my drink and wait for the next horror production to hit theaters. Be looking for another article next week and don't be afraid to be scary.
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