“The Pope's Exorcist” is inspired by the true story of Father Gabriele Amorth, the Pope's personal exorcist. It stars Russell Crowe as Amorth in ab admittedly engaging performance, despite a thick Italian accent. While I think Crowe's performance is able to save it out of purgatory, the rest of the movie doesn't completely attain salvation. 

Crowe plays Amorth as more of an action hero rather than your typical priest. He delivers wisecracks, he drinks whiskey and he rides a scooter everywhere he goes. At the beginning, Amorth is in trouble with superiors after performing an exorcism in which the demon went into a pig and Amorth subsequently kills the pig. 

He's summoned by the Pope (Franco Nero) to a small village in Spain where a mother (Alex Essoe) and her two children (Laurel Marsden and Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) reside in an old abbey, which was left to them after her husband and their father passed away. The son hasn't spoken a word since his father's death and the daughter is a typical rebellious teenage girl. 

The boy becomes possessed and Amorth confronts the demon while having an assistant (Daniel Zovatto). The demon tries to attack them both psychologically while it shouts out a stream of blasphemous obscenities and test the two priests' faith. Amorth remains strong while the assistant is susceptible to the demon's methods.  

You won't see much in “The Pope's Exorcist” that you won't see in a lot of other movies about possession such as “The Exorcist” or “The Conjuring.” Any attempts at discovery of how the Vatican works and how they assign priests to their duties is only surface-level material. 

Crowe is sufficient as Amorth and a lot of his scenes work such as his own self-promotion when he tries to persuade the assisting priest to read some of the books that he's written. "They're good books!" exclaims Amorth. Crowe is clearly the anchor that holds the film together, but the rest of the movie suffers from not having enough intrigue to suggest whether the boy will get free from his possession. 

Plus, the ending comes down to a series of events that take us further and further out of the real world that this movie is supposedly revolving around and puts us straight into something bewildering. 

I wanted to admire this movie much more than what I got. Any movie that is supposedly inspired by the files of a real-life priest should have material much more insightfully sumptuous, but the results only produce just another horror feature that fails to put the fear of God into us.

Grade: B-

(Rated R for violent content, language, sexual references and some nudity.)