# Osage at the Cineplex...THE RITE (Warner Bros./New Line Cinema)



## Osage_Winter (Apr 8, 2010)

I saw this last night and don't really know what to make of it; I really wanted to see it -- the trailers depicted Anthony Hopkins as a priest working near the Vatican possessed by a demonic spirit -- as I love these types of films, but something just fell flat, as I usually find. The premise was entertaining enough, and supposedly, this was "loosely based and suggested by/on an actual case"and involved a young, newly ordained priest sent to Rome to take a course in exorcism, who then meets Anthony Hopkins, a rather "unorthodox" priest who is friends with the senior course instructor at the Vatican...the young man is sent there after he simply doesn't believe in possession or the devil, and apparently, Hopkins' character has plenty of proof for him. But what follows is strange hokey-pokey nonsense we've seen in the same playbook as Exorcism of Emily Rose, Constantine, et al in which the so-called possessed people gyrate and buck around in a chair or on a bed, supposedly speaking in different tongues as demons have taken over their bodies. Hopkins brings the same quasi-comedic sarcasm to his priest character in this as he did in Fracture, and that saves many of the possession sequences from seeming boring or cliched; at times, Hopkins' dialogue humorous dialogue delivery seems odd and ill timed, especially for the fact that the filmmakers were going for a seriously themed film here. 

But these visits to Hopkins' home where he, predominantly, performs makeshift exorcisms on a young girl, still doesn't convince the young priest-in-training (or is he a priest? We are never really sure) that the devil even exists, or that these people are actually possessed. That is, until strange things begin to hit home for him -- such as when his father (played by Rutger Hauer) passes away and some characters he comes in contact with in Rome seem to know about it beforehand, and of course when the moment comes that Hopkins himself gets possessed by a demon, and this young priest must perform an exorcism on him. The final possession sequence is entertaining, but it doesn't come close to the original Exorcist, or even Exorcist III's final possession sequence; the whole thing just feels kind of forced, with Hopkins strapped to a chair up in the attic of his home where the young priest and a woman journalist in Rome to do a story on exorcism have come to confront the demon inside of Hopkins. There's little CGI or makeup effects to speak of; the demonic possession tidbits are more about the demon inside of Hopkins talking filthy to and about the young priest and his family, and there are moments when Hopkins' face turns colors and his eyes look a bit transparent and watery when he's possessed -- almost like they did in his portrayal of Doctor Lecter in Silence of the Lambs -- but overall, this wasn't very frightening.

More disappointing was the suggestion that once the exorcism is over, Hopkins just talks to the young priest like nothing happened, wishing him well in his battle over evil in his future priestly endeavors; the conclusion of the film was weak and didn't tie anything up all that great.

Did anyone else see this yet? What did you think?


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