Review of The Pope's Exorcist (2023) by Mauro_Lanari — 14 May 2023

(Mauro Lanari).

If Screen Gems purchased the rights to Gabriele Amorth's books in October 2020, Avery does not know what to do with it and finally provides an almost 60-year-old Crowe with permission for a disengaged role as a gascon, a braggart, a sly: the Bruce Willis of "Die Hard". Unexpected fun as much as guaranteed, just do not fixate with the idea that you are watching a horror film or a sequel to the progenitor signed by Friedkin [which anyway, when I saw it at the cinema with one of my brothers, made us laugh out loud: everyone has the fears he deserves]. Furthermore, the caricaturity that pervades the movie was perhaps the price to pay to touch on serious topics: the opening scene that should be set in Tropea in '87 while instead represents a pre-war Italy serves to justify a family with a pig, in turn necessary to stage the episode that recurs in the Synoptics (Mark 5:9-13; Luke 8:30-33; Matthew 8:28-32). The distance between the mysticism of pope Wojtyla and the theological rationality of Cardinal Ratzinger is history. The inability to reconcile demonology and soteriology, divine predeterminism and free will (was the Inquisition a diabolical or human work?) still afflicts Vatican doctrine. A real flaw I found? I know of no exorcism that does not begin by invoking the protection of the archangel Michael. After that one should have to interpret such phenomena from completely different points of view, but this is another "film".