The Pope's Exorcist review: Not even the power of Russell Crowe should compel you to see this

While the entire film Internet obsessed over Chris Pratt’s Mario accent, Russell Crowe has quietly slipped in with The Pope’s Exorcist, speaking in an Italian-a accent-a that’s every bit as insane as the Greek one he brought to Thor: Love And Thunder. He also delivers dialogue in actual Italian as well, as in this film’s opening sequence where he cuts to the chase in a small-town exorcism, immediately challenging the demon to jump into a pig, where its brains are promptly blown out. But this is a feature for audiences who may not want to read subtitles for the duration, so he switches up to accented English the rest of the time.

That can be amazing to watch, when he’s dramatically intoning, “My diocese is Rome! My bishop is the Pope!” to a committee which is determined to find him out as a fraud, and when he’s trying to be sensitive with platitudes like, “A mother’s love is the closest thing we know to God’s love.” The Crow said it better, but the Crowe says it funnier.

He’s equaled in the accent department by a possessed boy (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) speaking with a Cockney-accented demonic voice (Ralph Ineson) that sounds almost exactly like Andy Serkis. Not the vocal chameleon Serkis who played Gollum and Caesar, though; more the un-mo-capped version if he were five beers in at the local pub. The child grabs his mother’s breasts and yells, “Baby’s hungry, you fat cow!” Then he threatens to have sex with Crowe’s Father Gabriele Amorth and bring him to climax. It’s impossible to take any of this remotely seriously, or find it particularly frightening. But it is its own sort of fun, at least for a while.

Ostensibly based on true events, with the real Amorth claiming to have performed over 50,000 exorcisms, this ’80s-set movie replaces the actual pontiff of the time, Poland’s John Paul II, with an unnamed Italian Pope played by Franco Nero, the original Django. If that doesn’t appropriately set the tone, nothing will, unless it’s Crowe riding around the Spanish countryside (the movie was actually shot in Ireland) on a Ferrari motor scooter half his width.