Hopkins becomes the tutor of a young priest (Colin O'Donoghue) too skeptical to believe the gnashings and writhings of the ''possessed'' are anything but psychological symptoms. The trouble is, the film seems to think that this amounts to a serious crisis of faith. The hero is a cipher; who cares if he's saved from his skepticism? When he and Hopkins team up to expunge a demon from a pregnant Italian teenager, there's no shock in her tongue flickerings and Latinate rantings. ''Were you expecting swiveled heads and pea soup?'' asks Hopkins. Maybe not, but we were expecting something we hadn't seen a dozen times in the recent cycle of exorcist thrillers. The Rite commits the supreme sin of making the devil dull.
