10 Recent Movies That Weren't What Anyone Expected
3. The Ritual
Granted, most people weren't expecting much of anything from the new exorcism movie The Ritual considering it slunk into cinemas with barely a sliver of marketing.
But in the very least, the prospect of Al Pacino playing a German-American priest, Father Theophilus Riesinger, left the door wide open for the actor to deliver a scenery-devouring performance for the ages.
After all, in even Pacino's worst movies, there's typically a swinging-for-the-fences performance to look forward to, right?
Well, in perhaps an all-timer instance of an actor subverting expectations in all the wrong ways, Pacino actually decides to take the assignment dead-seriously.
His accent isn't particularly hammy and there are none of the volcanic, explosive Pacino freak-out scenes we've been conditioned to anticipate - it's an oddly subdued attempt at a dramatic turn.
And that might've worked if The Ritual was doing anything even remotely interesting, but it's such a generic, airless, energy-devoir bore of a movie that an overacting Pacino was really the only hope that it might become even half-way watchable.
As a result, it was far, far duller than anyone would've ever expected a Pacino-starring exorcism movie to be.