Angels and demons are hot stuff these days, but no one in Hollywood seems to know what to do with them. The Devil’s Advocate, Michael and A Life Less Ordinary were all tedious exercises in pointlessness, and that’s before one accounts for the fact that even the good angels in these films tended to be a rather sordid, scuzzy lot. Whether they’re paunchy, promiscuous layabouts or matchmaking assassins with a thing for bad poetry, these have been the sort of angels that you don’t want to be touched by.
So if Fallen, a modest and relatively unassuming thriller written by Nicholas Kazan (Reversal of Fortune) and directed by Gregory Hoblit (Primal Fear), is one of the better films in this genre, it’s not because it faces a lot of competition.
Fallen keeps things simple and unchallenging, pitting a heroic, straight-arrow cop named John Hobbes (Denzel Washington, who played one of this decade’s more charming angels in the otherwise bland The Preacher’s Wife) against a fallen-angel-turned-serial-killer named Azazel. Azazel has no corporeal form, so he possesses one human after another — and at least one animal — to commit his crimes and taunt the police while staying free of their grasp.
Fortunately, these two characters are not overly simplified. Washington is, by now, a pro at fleshing out the noblest of good guys with warmth and sincerity, and Hoblit, or at least his casting director, deserves credit for keeping Azazel’s character consistent across a wide range of actors, most of whom appear onscreen for only a minute or so. (The first of these, Elias Koteas, played a cop chasing fallen angels himself in The Prophecy.)
Between these polar opposites lie some nicely shaded supporting characters, particularly among the cops with whom Hobbes shares an engaging, if potentially corruptible, camaraderie. Most of the actors in this police station — including John Goodman, Donald Sutherland and James Gandolfini — have successfully skirted the line between good and evil in previous roles, so when Azazel enters their lives, one ought to get the sense that he, rather than impose his evil on the people he controls, is feeding on the sinful nature that is already there. Unfortunately, Hoblit never really explores that possibility.
Asked what Azazel and the other fallen angels are up to, a theology professor (Embeth Davidtz) replies that they hope to destroy human civilization: “It’s inside of us — it’s inside of human beings — that their vengeance is played out,” she says.
If, by that, she means that Azazel wants to attack humans from within on some sort of spiritual level, there is no evidence of this in the film. Azazel’s concerns seem pretty mundane, in fact. He hops from person to person simply because, without a body at his disposal, he can’t get anything done, and he apparently has no greater ambition than to bump off one person at a time.
This low-key quality is characteristic of Fallen as a whole. For a film about a demonic serial killer, Fallen is surprisingly free of the sort of visceral shock tactics that made The Exorcist and Seven such controversial hits. Azazel kills his victims quietly with poison-filled syringes, and one never quite gets the sense that there is anything larger at stake than the lives of a few murder victims. There is no hint of any larger spiritual war against which this battle is played, nor is it clear just how Azazel’s idle tactics are supposed to cause society’s downfall.
In the end, Azazel is just one more serial killer, albeit one with an unusual gimmick, and Hobbes is just one more cop trying to track the bad guy down. There’s an interesting idea or two hidden somewhere in Fallen, particularly in its very last moments, but this is one earthly story with a heavenly theme that never gets off the ground.
— A version of this review was first published in ChristianWeek.
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