 Gabriel has a very special set of skills. Skills he's acquired from the Vatican over many years of practice. These skills include, but are not limited to, driving a Vespa. Keeping the atmosphere light, especially when a family member loved one, a child is climbing up a wall or ceiling, spewing bile out of their stupid face, and kind of just acting like a jerk. But by far his best feature is exercising demons right out of a person's body. Get out of there, you. Yo, you don't belong here. He's a character. Let's talk The Pope's Exorcist. The Pope's Exorcist was a movie that was released in 2023, believe it or not. Yeah, the year you're probably watching this video. It was in theaters for two hours, and now it's on streaming platforms. I watched it on Netflix. Movie's an hour 43, which is a beautiful runtime for me. It's a nice horror flick. It's a thriller. It's got some humor in it. And it's got Russell Crowe, honestly, being better than he has been in quite some time. When I saw the trailer for this movie, I thought, that's not for me. That's not really my cup of tea. I like a good horror film. I like a good thriller. Exorcism style stuff, not really in my ballpark. It's kind of just gross. The body's always contorting or yelling stuff. It's just not my favorite sub-genre, if you will. But I took a chance on this one. My wife and I watched it until the wee hours of the morning, and I have to tell you, I actually quite enjoyed it. Subscribe for liking a movie. This is directed by Julius Avery, who previously worked on a little film called Overlord, which is a wild ride to be had. I saw that one in theaters too. I missed the review on that one, but I enjoyed that as well. That one's a lot more gory. That one's a lot more intense. Check it out if you have a strong stomach. This film, The Pope's Exorcist, not near as tough on the stomach. Your tummy's gonna be okay when it's over. It's also not scary in the slightest. Not that I don't know if it's pretending to be. I don't even remember the trailer. I just remember Russell Crow kind of levitating that one point. He's saying a bunch of nonsense words. But the film, believe it or not, runs really well. It's got a lot of intriguing ideas behind it. It's kind of like a, not necessarily a murder mystery who done it, but there's some stuff going under the surface, bubbling, that our hero, Gabriel, is gonna have to try to uncover, specifically with the Vatican, who he works for. The plot is very basic. It's straightforward. It's linear, which I appreciate as a idiot. This works well for me. Got a small cast of characters. The movie primarily takes place in one central location, which is a creepy old house. Everyone's favorite. And it's really focused in on one specific family. This kind of reminded me of Evil Dead Rise. We once again have a widowed wife. She's gotta raise the children. This house has been gifted to her. And she's just trying to make ends meet. She's gonna fix this thing up, sell it, blow out a dodge with the funds. But there's no funds to be had here. Kind of played on that word a little bit for you. Because the boy of the family has been taken over by a demon, a creature of the underworld, one of Satan's little helpers, or so it seems at first. But it turns out this demon is quite a bit more powerful than we first initially thought. And he's requesting the big guns. He wants Gabriel here to do the exorcism himself. Why? What purpose could that serve? Well, there's stuff going on. There's stuff going on. And it's gonna be revealed as the film progresses. I will say, story-wise, it kept me hooked. I think the visuals are very sound. It's a solid looking movie, nice contrasting colors. The effects are very practical for the most part until we dip into the CG territory in the final 15 minutes, which is easily the worst part for me. It loses a lot of its luster. It loses a lot of the stakes. When you can tell you're looking at complete CG nonsense. Thankfully, it's only for a small portion of the flick. It doesn't ruin the overall experience. This movie had a very different vibe to me. It felt almost Mission Impossible-esque with the Pope's exorcist kind of being the Ethan Hunt of the group. He's got his head to bishop or whatever the hell they're called. I don't know. Telling him, listen, we have a mission for you if you choose to accept it. You're gonna have to go to this house, perform an exorcism on this child, get the demon out. It's a, it's pretty much an impossible task. A mission impossible, if you will. And since it's our calling, that is your mission as a missionary to go there and do the Missionary Impossible. I don't know if that works, but we're gonna go with it. We have a good energizing background score during this movie. It's keeping you hooked. It's keeping you going. The effects, like I said, they can be hit or miss at the end of the movie, but I mean, we have some scarring of the skin. We have heads twisting and turning without it getting too cartoonish. We got people crawling all over the ceilings and shit. It looks good. It looks practical. It looks realistic. And I really dig the character Russell Crowe's plane. He's a no-nonsense priest. He's drinking on the job. He's cracking jokes to the demon. He's ignoring it. Just kind of paying a lot of disrespect, which is fair for his position. On the negative end of things, I will say the biggest gripe I have outside of that final little bit of CG stuff is the family that this is focused on has a very abrupt conclusion. The main character is obviously Gabriel, but this family we spent a lot of time with, so it just felt a little abrupt how they got rid of that whole thing. As I stated, I gave this a chance. It was on Netflix. I figure I pay for the service. I might as well get something once in a while out of it instead of watching these dreadful heart of stone films that they're putting out. This was worth my time. I would love to hear from you. Do you think it's worth yours? Let me know if you saw it in theaters for the couple hours it was out there or if you checked it out on streaming as well. Leave a comment below. Please, like the video. Just splash it with some holy water and if it doesn't burn on impact, like it possibly will, then we're good. We're golden and you can stay here and listen to me go on some more because I post movie commentary, movie reviews, rants, all sorts of stuff every single week. We'd love to have you stick around the channel. And if you really enjoyed what I'm doing, I also have a Patreon. Patreon.com slash Adam Does Movies. We'd love to have more support there as well. Anything you can do, I'd appreciate. All right, hopefully I see you next time. And may God have mercy on your soul. Okay.