Moving back a week on the release calendar because of Taylor Swift next week, The Exorcist: Believer was released as a sort of sequel to the original classic horror film from 1973. Blumhouse gave the reigns of this new version of the franchise to David Gordon Green, who was behind the recent Halloween trilogy.

Sadly, this film was about as good as those Halloween movies.

Two young girls, Angela (Lidya Jewett), and her friend Katherine (Olivia O’Neill), walked from school, going into the woods and disappeared. Angela’s father Victor (Leslie Odom Jr) desperately tried to find his daughter. Three days later, the girls returned without knowing how long they were missing.

It does not take long to realize that there was something terribly wrong with the girls. Ann Dowd played Ann, who directed Victor to go see Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) who was an expert in the possible situation.

I’ll start off with the good things about the movie, because this was not a total failure in my opinion. The two little girls did a nice job with their performances. I enjoyed Leslie Odom Jr. a lot. He carried himself as a star.

The start of the film spent a decent amount of time building the character of Angela and Victor. Of course, the film did almost nothing for Katherine or her family. They were just there.

That is about it. The film’s story was derivative. There was nothing different or new about the film, outside of the fact there were two possessed children instead of one. Very original (sarcasm).

Ellen Burstyn was forced into the story in an attempt to make this connect to the original. Burstyn played the mother in the original The Exorcist and she is so wasted in this movie. She was barely in the film. In fact, most of her appearance in the film was found in the trailer.

The ending of this movie was just terrible. I did not like that third act at all. No spoilers, but it did not work for me at all.

Overall, I did not hate myself for watching this, but I did not enjoy the film. I am not sure why this is considered a sequel to The Exorcist because it could have been any generic possession movie. There was nothing new or worthwhile about doing it.

2.4 stars