Review of The Vatican Tapes (2015) by Leon B — 01 Apr 2016

Review:

This is one of those typical Exorcist movies, with a straight forward storyline, which wasn't that great! Basically, an everyday young girl, Angela (Olivia Taylor Dudley) gets possessed by a demon and is hospitalised, with her dad, Roger Holmes (Dougray Scott) and boyfriend Pete (John Patrick Amedori), by her side. As there is nothing that the doctors can do, she is released from hospital but the on sight preacher, Father Lozano (Michael Pena), knows that there is something suspect about her. Soon after she is released, she causes car crash which puts her in a coma, and when they decide to turn of the life support machine, she comes back alive, to everyone's amazement. While she is in hospital, she wakes up in the night and nearly kills a baby, so they put her in a psychiatric hospital, so she can be under 24hr watch. After a few extremely weird events, which are caused by her, the hospitals psychiatrist, Dr. Richards (Kathleen Robertson) decides to release her, and her father gets help from a Vatican priest, Cardinal Bruun (Peter Andersson), to perform an exorcism with Father Lazano, to release the demon. After an epic showdown, which goes totally wrong, Angela escapes from the exorcism and later on her life, she starts to perform miracles around the world, with Father Lazano and Vicar Imani (Djimon Hounsou) closely watching her from the Vatican. So basically, the devil girl is roaming the streets getting the public thinking that she is a miracle worker when she is really the devil. Sounds great but it really wasn't! Because the movie broke even, there might be a part 2, which will see the priest go after the devil girl but I won't be rushing to see it. The acting was quite poor from Olivia, because she didn't really play the role convincingly. The rest of the cast wasn't bad but I would have liked to have seen more from Djimon, who was perfect for his role. The storyline also wasn't that great because none of the strange events were investigated by anyone, which I found a bit strange. If they would have looked into her past, they would have known that the random miracles that she was performing were suspect, especially after the police officer killed himself, and I'm surprised that no one looked at the recordings that were made in the hospital. Anyway, the film was badly put together and the sketchy storyline, really needed some work. Disappointing!

Round-Up:

As I'm quite a fan of Michael Pena, 40, who usually stars in some decent movies like Ant-Man, The Martian, Vacation, Fury, American Hustle, Gangster Squad, End Of Watch etc, I thought that I would give this movie a chance, and when I saw that Djimon Hounsou also was in the cast, I was quite looking forward to it. How let down was I! Djimon was only in a couple of scenes but Michael Pena put in a good performance, even though the script was awful. This movie was directed by Mark Neveldine, 42, who wrote and directed the funny Crank, Gamer, Crank: High Voltage, and the awful Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance. He really didn't make the most out of the decent cast and the sketchy script became predictable and quite boring after a while. .

Budget: $13million.

Worldwide Gross: $13.5million.

I recommend this movie to people who are into their horror/thrillers starring Olivia Taylor Dudley, Michael Pena, Djimon Hounsou, Alison Lohman, Kathleen Robertson and Dougray Scott. 2/10.