What we have here is a Santeria flavored occult thriller starring Martin Sheen and Robert Loggia as a psychiatrist and cop (respectively) who must solve the murders of ethnic children while avoiding curses. They, of course, do not believe in curses so we waste a lot of time dealing with that when instead we could be watching the curses unfold or learning about the bad guy or literally doing anything else.
I despise the "convince the skeptic" trope. It is my least favorite thing in horror/thriller movies.
Martin Sheen plays Cal, a widowed psychiatrist who gets wrapped up in a mystery. It's a mystery that involves bad Santeria, Good Santeria, trances, child sacrifices, and assorted insects. It also involves him yelling at his son, hooking up with his landlady, yelling at his maid, and generally getting his groove back.
It's OK. I mean, director John Schlessinger did MARATHON MAN and MIDNIGHT COWBOY, and it has a cast full of heavy hitters. It's not like it's bad. There are nice, tense moments here and there. The opening bit with the coffee machine got to me. One of my issues with the film is that is deeply entrenched in the world of boomer thrillers. The racial politics are less than savory to modern tastes, though it is definitely better in that sense than others of its ilk. The whole plot has some clever things happening here and there, and in the end the villain pays for engaging in wholesale capitalistic cultural appropriation. I guess you take what you can get from this particular subgenre. My bigger complaint is that I found this movie to be sort of boring. That's a pretty big problem when you're making a alleged thriller. I think overall I would say that it's at the high end of average, but nothing I'd go out of my way to engage with ever again. If you're into upper-class single middle-aged white dads solvin' problems and rightin' wrongs, then it might be for you. It was fine, but not really for me.
I give THE BELIEVERS a rock-solid 3/5 under-the-counter Cialis prescriptions.
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