The film's casual chauvinism is established early on when Derrickson and Boardman make table-setting jokes at the expense of women met by Sarchie and Mendoza. The world of "Deliver Us From Evil" needs a real man to clean up all the messes that demon-possesed, absent fathers have left behind. The only recognizably human domestic-minded person in this film is Sarchie's wife Jen ( Olivia Munn), but she's mostly sad that Sarchie's "never here, not even when you're home." Instead, whenever he enters victims' homes, we see omnipresent crucifixes, a comically vampish Italian woman, a bloated corpse, creepy basement junk, and enough crumbling fixtures to make Bob Villa cry. If this film were even semi-critical of Sarchie's testimony, it would acknowledge that, in any other context, Sarchie's version of events is " Taxi Driver"-levels of deranged. These two tough (but fair!) men inevitably team up, but only after more children are threatened, pets are abused, and women are treated like accessories.ĭerrickson and Boardman's film is more than just a sympathetic representation of Sarchie's paranoia. In each case, rebellious, Sarchie finds that hard-drinking Jesuit priest Father Mendoza ( Edgar Ramirez) is already on the case, waiting to nudge skeptical Sarchie toward a no-man-is-an-island acceptance of his limitations. In each case, parents abuse their children while a mysterious string-bean of a man ( Sean Harris) hovers nearby, painting over ominously legible graffiti written entirely in Latin. Sarchie's supernatural radar leads him and wise-ass partner Butler ( Joel McHale) to a string of related domestic abuse cases. For example, Eric Bana's Sergeant Ralph Sarchie, a haunted member of the New York Police Department, simply knows when bad things are going on around him because he has an intuitive "radar"-like sixth sense. Many of "Deliver Us From Evil"s creative shortcomings result from Derrickson and Boardman's lazy articulation of their film's interest in spiritual doubt and penance.
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