The First Power

As The First Power opens, a nun pleads with her superiors to do something about the serial killer who is possessed by the Devil. In an excellent endorsement for the Catholic Church, she is basically told that this is the 20th century, they’re not at all concerned with Satan anymore, and that she should go back to her cloister and pray for humility. That makes no sense; deciding that arrogant nuns are your real problem while believing in God and not the Devil is like expecting Batman to save Gotham from Alfred when there’s no Joker. Or something.

Meanwhile, our hero, Lou Diamond Phillips, is chasing the same serial killer through the urban jungles of Los Angeles. He gets a mysterious call from a psychic woman who tells him the location of the killer’s next strike on the condition that he not seek the death penalty once he catches the bad guy. Of course he catches him, nearly losing a female officer along the way, and of course the next thing you know, Phillips is drinking champagne to celebrate the death sentence for the killer. But once the killer has assumed room temperature, his spirit begins jumping from body to body racking up the kill count even more….and now he’s targeting cops. Can the cop, the psychic, and the nun stop the Father of Lies?

I have not heard anything about The First Power since its highly publicized theatrical release. Turns out it is an action horror movie, and it’s not bad, but it’s not great either. The horror elements are to my liking. There are some dream sequences, some hallucinations, and a little bit of suspense during the scenes in which you don’t know who the killer will jump into next, and whether each person Phillips deals with is possessed or not. I particularly enjoyed the scene in which Phillips’s character, a lapsed Catholic, attempts to go to confession, only to find that Satan is there in the church. I thought church was supposed to be a base or a safe spot, so that makes the scene creepier.

The problem is with the action, or the lack of it, being replaced with a little too much drama. There are some car chases, and people falling off of buildings, a little bit of running, and a little bit of fighting, but it’s not enough to balance the amount of room left over for action. I don’t mind a horror/drama film, but this was just cheesy drama. Phillips and the killer both have dad issues, and the psychic has love troubles, and the dialogue was laughable. The psychic actually says angrily, “I am not some crackpot, I am a professional psychic!” Haw haw haw!

The killer’s family situation is brought up way too late in the film, and almost feels like an afterthought as well as a really obvious plot point. At one point the cop and the psychic walk into a bar, which should be a setup for a joke (not really, but I had say it) but instead ends up with a stupid lovers’ spat between the two of them which kind of comes out of nowhere. Also, the nun character is underutilized, which is not the ideal situation when you’re dealing with Satanic possession.

Overall, The First Power is not terrible, it’s not regrettable, and although many people feel the same story was done better a few years later in the Denzel Washington vehicle Fallen, I like The First Power better. I just think it could have been an even better story if it had been a bit grittier, had more action or more horror, and characters I could either care about or who kept their personal business to themselves. This had a 10 million dollar budget, so there was a lot of wasted potential. Worst of all, in the ultimate irony, Los Angeles makes a horrible filming location. It’s ugly and has no soul. Maybe someday they will remake this and set in in New York or Rome.

The biggest surprise about The First Power is that the dude who played Bubba in Forrest Gump was kind of hot in 1990! Who knew?