‘The Rite’ turns cheesy

"The Rite" has the body of an ambitious horror movie, but its soul, I'm afraid, is lost to the demon of schlock.

This split is reflected in the way it views "The Exorcist," a movie it pretends to have outgrown even as it raids it for ideas.

In one early scene, Anthony Hopkins drops an "Exorcist" reference as he tidies up after a ho-hum demon confrontation, saying to his new apprentice: "What did you expect, pea soup?"

This occurs in the movie's intriguing first act, as "The Rite" sets itself up as a thoughtful horror movie of ideas, possibly even a religiously serious one. It has a PG-13 rating, and seems to want to build its movie around characters, as opposed to shock.

Hopkins is Father Lucas, assigned by the Vatican to take on apprentice Michael Kovak (Colin O'Donoghue), a budding priest who's lost his faith, but not his styling gel. Hopkins underplays, sketching Lucas as a world-weary technician, who views possessed individuals the way a mechanic looks at a car with a bad engine.

It's hard to say what taxes Father Lucas the most, wrestling with demons or contending with Kovak's atheism, which Father Lucas sees as trite, a predictable marker of the younger man's shallow generation.

This is promising, and leaves open the possibility that "The Rite" could evolve into an interesting exploration of faith and skepticism.

So when, exactly, does it become schlocky and laughable?

Right about the moment that Kovak looks into a darkened window and a screaming cat leaps at his face. Leaping cat, loud jolt of music - it's director Mikael Hafstrom's first hack gesture, but not his last. They start to come fast and furious, as the movie junks its putative character study for cheap, laughable thrills.

Mules with red eyes, possessed girls speaking in tongues, contorted spines with bone-shredding sound effects. And somebody takes the leash off Hopkins, never a good idea. Through it all, young Kovak remains hilariously unimpressed. His father speaks to him from hell, he finds a plague of frogs in his room, has his future predicted, and still nothing. Isn't that taking atheism a little far?

As Kovak, Colin O'Donoghue seems to have been given only one acting instruction: Have your blue eyes look solemnly into the camera. I don't know that he ever changes expression - in one scene he has a stare-down with the red-eyed mule and I'd call it a draw.

Whatever pretensions "The Rite" had to substance are long gone by that point. For a more interesting take on the same subject, try the DVD of last summer's "The Last Exorcism."