Pretty good, but pretty flawed

Rating: 7/10 (14 June 2008)

Well, after all these year, I finally got around to seeing this picture, to see what all the fuss was about.
What I found was, it was a pretty good horror movie, but nothing all that outstanding. There was a lot of good stuff, but some pretty bad flaws too. There seemed to be an *awful* lot of extraneous stuff in the movie that should've been just left out, to make a tighter story. For instance, what was up with that whole opening scene in Iraq? What did that have to do with *anything*? Yeah, it provided a little exposition on the exorcist character, but not really that much, and by the time the dogs are barking and the weird guy is staring at him, the whole thing starts to make no sense and asks more questions than it answers. Or the prolonged story about the shrink-priest's mother, that seemed to be done in vastly more detail than was warranted for its importance to the story. Or, really, the *entire* character of the cop, which ends up going nowhere. And I'm still scratching my head trying to figure out the relevance of the drunk guy making Nazi accusations.
There's also a fundamental problem here of motive. What on *earth* was the demon trying to accomplish by possessing the girl? With the power that the demon clearly possessed, you'd think it could've found better ways to cause havoc or do evil or whatever the heck its goal was, than just by tormenting a little girl and her family. That thing could've caused trouble on a vastly larger scale than that! And I still can't really find any method to its madness. First clanking around in the attic, what did that accomplish? Then taking a LONG time to possess the little girl, why the painfully slow approach, when he was able to take over the priest instantaneously? (yeah, the priest invited him in, but still. The girl was pretty much helpless to resist) In short, the demon's character is very badly contrived; it conveniently does whatever will lead to a gradual build-up of suspense and shock in the film for the convenience of the director, rather than having any logical or consistent motive for what it was doing.
Still, while rather slow in developing, it did hold my interest, and I did care about the outcome, and it was pretty creepy, if not exactly terrifying. Again, a pretty good horror flick, but no great masterpiece.