Entertainment

Exorcise in futility

‘What did you expect? Spinning heads? Pea soup?” a veteran exorcist tells a young priest having a crisis of faith in the boring, silly and deeply unscary feature “The Rite.”

If only. In this threadbare and risible rehash of “The Exorcist,” we get a donkey with glowing red eyes, a plague of frogs, a pregnant woman spitting up railroad bolts.

And perhaps worst of all, a scenery-chewing Anthony Hopkins as the elderly exorcist who never shuts up — either in English or Italian — even when he himself is possessed.

Opening with a quote from Pope John Paul II, “The Rite” claims to be “inspired by true events” and centers on Michael Kovak (Colin O’Donoghue), a former Chicago mortician on the verge of dropping out of the seminary.

After watching Michael deliver last rites to a dying woman, his teacher (Toby Jones) blackmails Michael — something to do with a large tuition bill — into transferring to the church’s mysteriously coed new exorcism school in Rome.

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When Michael persists in telling his teacher at the Rome school (Ciaran Hinds) that the supposedly possessed are actually in need of a good psychiatrist, he’s shipped off to intern with Father Lucas (Hopkins), a garrulous Welsh doctor who has performed hundreds of exorcisms.

Small wonder Michael continues to have doubts when Father Lucas interrupts his work on that pregnant woman to take a cellphone call. And that exorcism doesn’t exactly work out well.

Director Mikael Hafstrom (of the much better “1408”) keeps interrupting the story with endless flashbacks showing the death of Michael’s mother when he was a boy — and his father (Rutger Hauer), also a mortician, preparing the corpse for her funeral.

Michael doesn’t start taking exorcism seriously until the devil takes possession of Father Lucas. Let’s just say that Hannibal Lecter has nothing to worry about.

Michael himself performs the laugh-inducing exorcism, assisted (for reasons known perhaps only to credited screenwriter Michael Petroni) by an Italian journalist (Alice Braga).

Despite an impressive cast (excluding the excruciatingly dull O’Donoghue, a newcomer from Ireland), “The Rite” is the sort of misfire that Hollywood has long buried in January.