Review of The Last Exorcism (2010) by Josh E — 31 Jul 2012

Methodical and unsettling pacing make this a film I enjoyed most the way through. As soon as things hit the fan, however, the film loses track of itself entirely. Without spoiling much, yes there is a demon. No it does not do anything novel or even subversive. The tension that the first two acts of film work so hard to build is sucked entirely from the film in the last act and the ending plays as though pages of screenplay had blown off the writer's desk.

All in all, a great disappointment. I came into the film expecting it to be subpar and was pleasantly surprised when it proceeded to be a tightly wound and carefully planned thriller...for two-thirds of the running time that is.

The movie's undoing seems to be that somewhere along the line they chose to jump the shark, but in such a way that it pretends to have never had rails in the first place. The way the final shots are planned seemed to be in a way that the director thought the end shot was a big reveal. It wasn't. It was just uninteresting.

Watch the film if you must, but the level of quality set forth at the beginning will surely betray you at the end.