“The Seventh Day” (2021)
Training Day — For Priests!
Training Day — For Priests!
I first watched The Seventh Day around a year or so ago and after being left totally unimpressed I decided to leave it a year to see if my instant evaluation was wrong and well, it wasn’t! “Training Day — For Priests” is a little lame I’ll grant you, but I’ve grown up with Guy Pearce and seen him veer from youthful Australian daytime TV smiles to LA Confidential in 1997, the bewilderment of not being able to make new memories in Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece Memento in 2000 before star turns in the incredible The Proposition in 2005 and the The Road in 2009. In this most recent decade alone, Pearce has collaborated with directors Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech), Ridley Scott (Prometheus) and John Hillcoat (Lawless) as well as returning for a fond farewell to the long running Australian TV show (Neighbours) that first shot him into the collective consciousness and, very importantly for Radiohead fans such as myself, he was credited with an appearance in the video to their 2021 resurrection of an old tune entitled “Follow Me Around” which is naturally, rather good indeed.
Directed by Justin P Lange in only his second feature length outing on the big screen, Pearce portrays “Father Peter” rather akin to Denzel Washington in the Antoine Fuqua directed Training Day in 2001. Unkempt, bearded and attired in street clothes rather than the more traditional garb of a practising Priest, Father Peter is a tired renegade and unorthodox exorcist now lumbered with yet another young priest from “a new wave of recruits” and has little time for this or for some fresh faced recruit from the Seminary. He may be “the best exorcist there is” but he’s not textbook, approachable or very deliberately, likeable, and his methods differ dramatically from that taught to the Seminary recruits. “You have to feel it in your bones” he implores his newest partner before pushing him into the deep end to see if he can swim.
Juxtaposed against the loose ways of his senior partner we find “Father Daniel” and star of the show Vadhir Derbez in only his ninth feature length film outing and, I believe, first major Western production. Nervous, anxious and somewhat overawed by his overbearing and storied senior partner, he’s “not ready” and although he’s “trained with the very best” he “looks like a Priest” according to Father Peter and must break the shackles of his training to live and feel the experience.
From a very interesting beginning and the real life stock footage of Pope John Paul II visiting Baltimore in 1995 and travelling the streets in his “Pope Mobile” surrounded by bullet proof plexiglass (which will forever remind me of the American comedian Bill Hicks mockery that if the Pope needed bullet proof protection, well “That’s faith in action, folks!”) and a fiery inferno that turns an exorcism into a mash up of The Exorcist and The Joker, the film had a wonderful opportunity to rip into established religion and failed to take it. One jump scare doth not make a horror film. Nor does the jarring ADR speech which just layered yet more exposition onto a film that needed its main characters on camera and frankly, the CGI effects were at times dreadful too.
There’s a little Devil’s Advocate feel to the chemistry between Guy Pearce and Vadhir Derbez but sadly nothing more in a fairly empty film.
Thanks for reading. Just for larks as always, and always a human reaction rather than spoilers galore. My three most recently published film articles are linked below or there’s well over 100 blog articles (with 300+ individual film reviews) within my archives from which to choose:
“The Tender Bar” (2021)
George Clooney the Director strikes again.medium.com
“Aftersun” (2022)
The unreliability of the persistence of memory.medium.com
“The Lighthouse” (2019)
Dark, disturbing psychological drama.medium.com