As if I wasn’t freaked out enough by religion…

Anthony Hopkins is an actor almost without equal. He’s been in the industry for a long ass time and put dozens of films under his belt. Rarely, if ever, does he give a bad performance. Rarer still does he pick a bad project. So, naturally when Mikael Hafstrom’s The Rite was added to Netflix, I was onboard to sit down and watch it. Well… at least I now know that Hopkins can’t save everything…

The Rite is a possession film and a pretty good one at that, but it could have been a lot more. For a film that tries to do so much, it really falls short of the lofty goal it sets for itself.  Based on true events, the film recounts a young clergyman, Michael Kovak, attending seminary in order to become an exorcist (Colin O’Donoghue). The crux is that Michael seems to have lost his belief in God. Under the tutelage of the veteran Father Lucas Trevant (Hopkins), Michael is shown the darker side of the Catholic Churches Exorcisms. As he is met with more and more grim situations, it becomes harder for Michael to explain these happenings rationally.

The plot isn’t that bad… even if it does glorify the Catholic Church a bit too much for my liking, at least in the spiritual sense. The film could easily fall into the Christian cinema genre by the end of its running time as well, which one can almost miss upon first viewing. Afterall, the film’s message is “faith prevails.” As a horror film, it doesn’t offer too many chilling or scary scenes, and while I applaud it for its lack of jump scares, I have say that if you can’t get the job done through atmosphere, then why make it a horror film at all?

The acting is mixed. A lot of the dialogue is in Italian (the film does take place in Rome) which Anthony Hopkins delivers pretty damn convincingly. However, O’Donoghue was nothing more than a shell that looked concerned about things for the whole running time. Supporting cast was pretty much superfluous, with a few exceptions (the possessed girl kicked some ass at being creepy) . Overall, I was really disappointed with the choices made by the cast.

                                                                                        Well, the verdict:
It kills me to think that a Hopkins performance couldn’t save a film from being generally uninteresting, but here we are. Bottom line, unless you’re a hardcore Hopkins fanatic (or a hardcore Catholic) I’d say dodge this one. It’s two hours of your life better spent elsewhere.