The Rite - 2 stars

I went to see The Rite hoping that it would present something new and interesting about exorcism. It doesn't. At all. There have been several exorcism movies recently, like The Exorcism of Emily Rose and The Last Exorcism. When I saw the trailer for The Rite, I thought this would be the one that got it right. It has Anthony Hopkins. It looks like it had a good sized bugdet. Exorcism is always good for a scare, right?

The movie is about Michael Kovak (Colin O'Donoghue). Michael lives and works in a funeral home with his father (Rutger Hauer). Not sure I could embalm a corpse in the basement, walk upstairs to the kitchen and sit down for dinner, but that is normal life for him. He decides to enter the seminary and become a priest. Cut to 4 years later. He is about to graduate and decides he doesn't want to be a priest. When he tries to resign, the Father Superior (Toby Jones) tells him that if he drops out, his scholarship will roll over to a student loan, and he will owe more than $100,000. That's how they get ya!

For some reason, the Father Superior decides that Michael should go to Rome and study to be an exorcist. There he attends exorcism class taught by Father Xavier (Ciaran Hinds). Here the movie really misses an opportunity. They could have given us some really good details about exorcism. Real or made up, I don't care. But the classes are skimmed over. We get maybe 2 short scenes in the class, and they give us very little information about exorcisms. Very disappointing.

Michael goes to Father Xavier and tells him he is skeptical. Apparently he is the only skeptical one in the class, because he is the only student Xavier sends to study with Father Lucas (Anthony Hopkins). Yes, we are at least 30 minutes into the movie before Hopkins appears on screen. Up to this point, the movie has been horribly dull. Hopkins does what he can to liven things up a little. He may be trying to exorcise demons, but he does it with a sense of humor.

Besides a few laughs with Hopkins, the only other interesting part of the movie is when Father Lucas himself is posessed (not a spoiler if you've seen the trailer). Hopkins plays creepy very well, and the movie gets a little scary when he is at his most menacing. But even posessed Hopkins gets boring fast because the movie doesn't give him anything interesting to do. The most intense thing he does is slap a little girl and yell at her. The rest of the time, he has creepy makeup and talks in a weird voice. That's about it.

Overall, a very boring and disappointing movie. Not scary at all.