Father Karras, meet Father Hannibal Lecter. He likes to cap his exorcisms with a dinner of liver, fava beans and nice Chianti. Whose bright idea was it to make an “Exorcist” knockoff with Anthony Hopkins as the Vatican’s exorcist-in-chief?
“The Rite” is purportedly based on “true events” and tells the tale of Michael Kovak (Colin O’Donoghue), a young man whose immigrant father, Istvan (Rutger Hauer), a bizarre mortician, talks to dead people and even forced his young son to say goodbye to the corpse of his dead mother.
As a young man, Michael decides to enter the seminary, even though he’s a stud, has no plans to become a priest and only wants to earn a degree at the church’s expense. It’s not nice to fool the Holy See.
Before you can say, “Your mother trucks rocks in hell,” Michael has been persuaded by his teacher, Father Matthew (Toby Jones, best known as the house elf Dobby in the “Harry Potter [website]” films) to go to the Vatican to study under exorcism authority Father Xavier (Ciaran Hinds). Father Xavier takes a liking to the tall, dark and handsome priest-in-training and sends him off to learn at the feet of Jesuit exorcist Father Lucas Trevant (Hopkins, speaking a lot of Italian).
Like Hannibal Lecter, Trevant is also a medical doctor. He is currently treating a beautiful, young Italian girl named Rosaria (a very good Marta Gastini). Aside from being extremely pregnant and possibly raped by her father, 16-year-old Rosaria has a bare spot on her head where she scratches herself and a tendency to go into a trance-like state in which she begins to sound suspiciously like Mercedes McCambridge.
One of the most important things an exorcist can do, Father Lucas tells Michael, is to find out the name of the demon possessing the person possessed.
That will give you power over the entity. Michael also meets the meaningfully named Angeline (Alice Braga of “I Am Legend”), a beautiful journalist who wants to write about the church and its secrets regarding the ancient practice of exorcism.
Some may wonder what so many fine actors are doing in this lousy movie or try to guess who will pronounce the name Xavier correctly or if and when Michael and Angeline get it on.
Others may ask themselves how many versions can we take of the great 1973 William Friedkin movie with Max Von Sydow in a career-definitive role as Catholic exorcist Father Merrin, an old priest who, along with the doubting Father Karras, famously took on Linda Blair and a demon named Pazuzu, Sumerian god of plagues.
“What did you expect?” Father Lucas asks Michael, “Spinning heads and pea soup?” Well, yeah, Father, I kind of did — or at least something more than a heavy-breathing, red-eyed mule demon.
Director Mikael Håfström (“1408”) makes excellent use of the art and architecture of Rome and the Vatican, giving this otherwise inconsequential effort a weight it does not have. Was there nothing Håfström could do to get Hopkins to stop doing Lecter? Can we get the actor an exorcist?
“I am Baal,” someone screams near the end. Yeah, well, I am bored.
(“The Rite” contains a PG-13 demon, disturbing thematic material, violence, frightening images and language that includes sexual references.)
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