Paul Schrader's telling of the backstory to The Exorcist -- the Nazis, the loss of faith, the postwar archaeological dig in Africa, the first exorcism, the renewed vocation -- had been deemed unreleasable in its finished form, and been replaced by Renny Harlin's retooling of it from scratch, with the same star (Stellan Skarsgard) and same cinematographer (Vittorio Storaro), under the title of Exorcist: The Beginning. Any comparison between the two -- they tell substantially the same story -- would be more interesting if the films themselves were more interesting. Such a comparison, as we doubtless should have divined, is only possible because they are not. We can hereby see for ourselves why the Schrader version -- solemn, slow, stagy, talky, listless -- was thought to be unreleasable. Why, though, it was thought to be remakeable, or for that matter makeable in the first place, is not so apparent. And why it was subsequently thought to be releasable after all, in light of the box-office egg laid by Exorcist: The Beginning, is an even bigger enigma. If nothing else -- most especially not the computer-generated hyenas or the maggoty baby -- the evocative central image of a buried church, a desecrated church, a downward-facing church, is put over with more punch, more showmanship, in the Harlin. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd