The Ritual Killer (2023)

1 Star (out of 4)

Sleeping Muti

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

A muddled, vaguely irritating, somewhat offensive serial killer movie, this un-thrilling thriller moves lifelessly through through its story and leaves off with a bizarre head-scratcher of an ending.

Police detective Lucas Boyd (Cole Hauser) is struggling with guilt over the accidental death of his daughter, so much so that he's willing to shoot a criminal in cold blood. In the midst of this trouble, a new case comes up for Boyd and his partner, detective Kersch (Murielle Hilaire).

It appears to be the work of a serial killer who takes various body parts from his victims. Boyd follows a hunch and goes to Dr. Mackles (Morgan Freeman), a professor of African Studies, for help. Mackles realizes that the killer could be a practitioner of the African Black Magic known as Muti. As Boyd continues to investigate, things grow stranger and more deadly.

The Ritual Killer comes from director George Gallo, who last gave us the agonizingly bad Vanquish. Somehow, after that train wreck, star Morgan Freeman was coaxed back into working with him again. The best that can be said is that Freeman is quite good here in his scenes an African Studies professor; his lecture is riveting. It's only later, shambling through the plot, that he gets stuck as a cog in this weary machine.

Apart from Freeman, certain other actors can barely deliver their lines, while star Hauser simply looks bored. Most infuriating is the awful villain, who comes across as a stereotypical African "voodoo" man, chanting and performing scary-looking rituals, with no indication as to who he really is. (Hauser doesn't even bother to pronounce the character's name, Randoku, correctly.) In the end, it would have been better to watch 90 minutes of Freeman lecturing than 10 minutes of The Ritual Killer.