Movie Review - Deliver Us from Evil

Deliver Us from Evil (2014)

Starring Eric Bana, Édgar Ramírez, Olivia Munn, Joel McHale, and Sean Harris

Directed by Scott Derrickson

If you're prone to epileptic seizures, Deliver Us from Evil may be the worst movie ever for you to attempt to watch.  There are more flickering lights than I've ever seen in a film, and when lights aren't flickering, we're treated to much lighting by a flashlight that enters and exits the frame.  Deliver Us from Evil attempts to be a little more "adult" in the horror story its trying to tell and I do give it credit for not appealing to the lowest common denominator of horror aficionados, but the film is a mess in large part due to the direction and screenplay cowritten by Scott Derrickson who can't seem to coax good performances out of his cast and really fails to create a visually enticing film to watch.  (And I liked what he did with his previous venture Sinister, so this was a big let down.)

To make a long convoluted story short, Eric Bana is a cop named Sarchie who teams up with a Jesuit priest named Mendoza (Édgar Ramírez) to solve a series of crimes that are being perpetrated by a seemingly possessed former US soldier home from Iraq.  There are a bunch of initially unrelated puzzle pieces that take much too long to set up -- the first thirty-five minutes seemed to go nowhere -- and although this opening act eventually made sense, I found myself wondering why in the world I was watching these episodic scenes of a cop investigating seemingly unrelated crimes.  The writing here just doesn't settle into place and the dialog between Sarchie and his wife (Olivia Munn) and his partner Butler (Joel McHale) just feels forced and lacking in any realness.

Add to that the already stated disappointing direction and Derrickson's belief that flickering florescent lights are the only things needed to develop tension and Deliver Us from Evil just doesn't work.  While the final exorcism sequence is a bit compelling and saves the film from being a total disaster, this one just disappoints all around.

The RyMickey Rating:  D