Deliver us from evil

"As a cop, I've always had a... heavy hand"

This sentence is uttered more than once and I find that "mantra" to be very fitting when dissecting this trainwreck of a movie.

The story revolves around Liutenant Sarchie. A police from the Bronx that stumbles onto several cases of the same nature, the same supernatural nature. Together with a priest he begins unraveling a mystery of apocalyptical proportions.

This movie must have been some kind of dare from the producers. Can you actually mix horror with a procedural cop movie? The answer is...not in this one. Horror and cop is mixed together in this movie, with varying degrees of success, but in the process of fuse these two very different genres something happened. The movie has influences from almost a dozen different genres. Horror, cop TV-show, buddy cop, action, kitchen sink realism, faith and spirituality, found footage and even a little bit of comedy.
The director, Scott Derrickson who also did the much better The excorsism of Emily Rose, can't seem to handle the fusion of the different genres and somwhere along the way he got lost. The movie switches between the genres back and forth and the script suffers. Issues are brought up and used to instigate certain emotions and reactions but then never spoken of again. All this makes the movie very confusing and the actors aren't helping. Eric Bana does a good enough job of playing the obnoxcious but still releatable Sarchie but the rest of the cast, including Joel McHale as the comic sidekick... in a horror movie, feels out of place. I can't put the blame solely on the performances but also on the characters them selves. Very few of them actually fit in a horror movie and even the point was to work against all the clichés, it all still feels weird and out of place.

The story hints at a very large scope and this movie could have been played out on a large canvas but instead it limits itself to the confines of the Bronx and about five people, the threat never feels real and because of this the movie fails to scare at all. I usually scream and jum and cover my eyes when I watch horror movies, but thus time I sat absolutely still for the movie

To say that this movie was a terrible fucking movie would not be a complete lie. It was a very interesting experiment that sadly, failed miserably.