Priest

What was the inspiration behind Priest? Surely there must have been some reason behind director Scott Stewart's decision to bring us such a hollow, joyless, drab, dreary, and ugly film. Of course, nobody sets out to make a bad movie, but sometimes, you just have to sit and wonder what anyone possibly saw in the script. Maybe he really liked working with Paul Bettany (who starred in Stewart's last film, Legion), and leapt at the chance to do it again. If that's the case, maybe he should have held out for Bettany's next project.

Priest started life as a Korean comic book, and had a long road to the big screen, being shuffled across various release dates, edited numerous times in a vain attempt to salvage an obviously doomed film, and then dumped right before the flood of summer movies start to hit. To add insult to injury, the film has been hastily converted into halfhearted 3D, meaning you pay extra so that the already muddy looking images can look even more lifeless. The film itself starts out with a two minute animated sequence that's more stylized than anything in the remaining 88 minutes of live action. It rushes us through the film's backstory of how humanity has been at war with vampires for years, until the Catholic church stepped in with some warrior Priests to take care of the problem. The skilled vampire slayers drove the monsters into dark caves and reservations where they could be watched over. As for the humans, they now are locked away in generic-looking cities that apparently can't afford their electric bill, and it rains 24-7. The church rules these cities with an iron grip, and the Priests themselves have gone into hiding, though they still display the crucifix tattoo on their faces, which must make it hard for them to blend in.

Our hero is a former Priest (Bettany) who is living a quiet life, until he is delivered news that vampires have attacked some relatives of his who live on a farm on the outskirts of the city, and that the blood-suckers have ran off with his young niece, Lucy (Lily Collins). She's being held captive by their leader, Black Hat (Karl Urban), who dresses like a villain in a Western, and is attempting to seek revenge on the humans by gathering up his vampire brothers onto a train that's headed for the human cities. The Priest tries to convince the church to allow him to take action and investigate the attack, but the head of the church (Christopher Plummer) refuses, believing that the vampire threat is over, and that sending Priests out into battle would be a waste of time. So, the Priest decides to break his vow not to disobey the church, hops on a motorcycle, and takes off into the desert to get some answers on his own.

He's quickly joined by a local Sheriff named Hicks (Cam Gigandet), who was dating Lucy when she was captured, and wants to help find her. So, we already have themes of horror, religion, oppressive societies, and traits of classic Westerns. Rather than make something out of this mix of ideas, Priest instead just kind of cobbles them together into a shoddy patchwork of cliches. Due to the fact that the movie has been edited numerous times before hitting the screen, characters just kind of show up instead of being properly introduced. A good example of this is a fellow Priest (Maggie Q), who is initially sent by the church to track down Bettany's character, only to immediately join him as soon as she tracks him down. There's some hollow exposition as to why she's helping him, and it has to do with a halfhearted forbidden romance subplot that is so inconsequential to everything else, you wonder why the filmmakers bothered in the first place.

But then, everybody is treated in the same manner in the screenplay by Cory Goodman. Nobody shows any personality, or maybe that's just the performances. Bettany scowls and frowns his way through every scene, Gigandet stands behind him, Maggie Q is mostly expressionless, and everybody basically looks like they wish they were somewhere else. This is a dead-in-the-water movie with no sense of building or sustaining tension. The vampires in the movie generally look and act like CG video game targets, existing mainly to pop out of dark places, scream, and then get killed. A character at one point makes the argument of how vampires are superior to humans, but it's kind of hard to take that comment seriously, when all they do is stand around and scream all the time, giving the heroes ample time to shoot or stab them.

Maybe at one time in the film's development, there was a spark of inspiration in Priest. I'll give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt, and suggest it got lost somewhere between the planning stages and the scripting. As it stands, this is a derivative and flat movie that fails to make the slightest impact on the viewer. There's nothing to care about, nothing to get excited about, and certainly nothing worth paying inflated 3D prices for. The movie doesn't even have the decency to have a sense of humor about itself. What a crime.

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