What opens as a slick, promising police procedural quickly jumps off the rails following an awfully efficient first act in Deliver Us From Evil. At around the halfway point, and until its conclusion, the film rests back on autopilot, adopting nearly every movie cliche, right down to an exorcism which shows us something we see at least twice a year in the cinema. I’m afraid I know little about its subject, NYPD officer Ralph Sarchie, however upon brief research, I discovered he patrolled the streets during the Koch administration. It’s a shame director Scott Derrickson didn’t set the film in the height of the crack epidemic and make a period thriller in the Bronx of the 1980’s. Of course, this might have limited Sony’s ability to place their sleek products, like a smart phone with video messaging that provides us with the exposition that Sarchie is married and has a little girl. The story is “inspired” by the actual accounts of Sarchie, and like the co-writer/director’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose, the circumstances have been altered, presumably to dumb them down.
Regardless, the job of a critic is to focus on the movie we do have, not the one we could have had. What opens as a clear-cut police procedural, including an effectively eerie sequence that introduces Sarchie to the demonic world (taking place in the Bronx Zoo after hours and during a power outage), quickly segues into the incomprehensible. After investigating a case involving a crazy women singing The Doors lyrics at the Bronx Zoo while throwing her child into the lion’s den, Eric Bana’s Ralph Sarchie quickly connects the dots. They point back to a trio of men who served time in Iraq, two of which have no started a painting business. After taking another late-night call to investigate an incident in the basement, Sarchie is ready to dismiss the trio as “fucking crazy” — that is, until Mendoza (Edgar Ramirez), a hard drinking renegade Castilian/Hungarian priest, enters. Overcoming a drug addiction, he gives his life to Christ, and inserting himself into the situation, he takes over for Butler, Sarchie’s tough partner (played, surprisingly, by Joel McHale). What follows is essentially predictable; without providing spoilers Sarchie is drawn into the case but remains careful to deliver justice. An annoying detail made up by Derrickson to prove he’s flawed is that Sarchie once beat a suspect to death in an alleyway. Why anyone would play that fast and loose with NYPD history (even if the perp had it coming) is beyond me, especially given the NYPD’s shameful history of killing first and asking questions later — anybody remember Sean Bell, Ousmane Zongo, and Amadou Diallo?
Quickly becoming an extraordinarily stupid flick despite a promising first act, the details of the actual case sound much more interesting; why must this story conform neatly to cliches we’ve seen before? Since this apparently is mostly a work of fiction, it wouldn’t be surprising if they have made a true story less interesting, as Hollywood continually tends to do. Allegedly the real Ralph Sarchie was involved in the making of this film (he’s been the subject of many online interviews). It’s a shame his film wasn’t worthy of the smart treatment Ed and Lorraine Warren got last summer with James Wan’s effective period horror film The Conjuring. That film took its subjects seriously; granted, liberties were taken, but substance was not substituted for plot and slick freak-outs. Derrickson’s previous film Sinister and his co-writing credit on Atom Egoyan’s Devil’s Knot prove he’s good at personal, family and procedural drama, some of the most effective elements here. Where this runs off the rails is when it speeds through the substance and morphs into an quasi-action film. Ralph Sarchie deserves a better, smarter and more subtle film.
Deliver Us From Evil is now playing in wide release.