Review: Priests, vampires, sheriffs… this thing is an unholy mess

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This article was published 14/05/2011 (5599 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Paul Bettany, voted “Most Likely to Wear a Cowl” at Drama Centre London, is a caped crusader once again in Priest, a mad mash-up of sci-fi, western, sacrilegious silliness and vampire movie.

What lifts it to “I’ve seen worse” status is the previous teaming of star and director Scott Charles Stewart, who last gave us the archangel-fighting-off-other-angels fiasco Legion.

And then there are the wonderful antecedents that this graphic novel adaptation borrows from.

In an animated prologue, we learn of the war between vampires and humans, of how the Church saved humanity by training a warrior caste of priests to fight the blood-suckers. The vampires were vanquished and packed into reservations. The Church became the all-powerful theocracy ruling over walled cities scattered across a Mad Max wasteland. But when a remote farm run by a fellow named Owen is raided, we know the “vamp-packs” are back on the warpath, and that somebody adapting this remembers Stars Wars.

And when a girl from that farm named Lucy (Lily Collins) is kidnapped, we know they were looking back to the movie that inspired Star Wars — the John Ford/John Wayne Western The Searchers. Lucy’s uncle, a former priest (Bettany), must hunt for her, joined by a boyish sheriff (Cam Gigandet) who might have been named Mr. Exposition. His costume makes Gigandet come off as Indiana Jones with a badge, before Indy’s voice changed. The Priest will kill the girl if the vampires have infected her. Sheriff Hicks aims to prevent that.

Lucy’s being held by the Black Hat, a most menacing vampire played by Karl Urban (Star Trek) in a modified Dr. McCoy drawl and Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name duds. “If you’re not committing sin, you’re not having fun.”

The quest is set as our heroes hunt through a production-designed-to-death landscape on the coolest motorcycles this side of TRON.

The omnipotent Church hierarchy, led by Christopher Plummer, has become a literal “opiate of the masses,” as Marx once put it. They’ve digitized confession, denied that “there’s a vampire threat” and ordered the Priest to leave his crucifix dagger and crucifix throwing stars at home.

“To go against the Church is to go against God.” They even send other priests (Maggie Q among them) to bring him back.

The eyeless digital vampires are nothing special (think I Am Legend), but the trains, cities and technology of this alternate Earth are wonderfully detailed. The fights are old-school Bullet Time riffs straight out of The Matrix, and dull.

Visual effects artist-turned-director Stewart played around with the casting (Brad Dourif and Urban share a scene, a mini Lord of the Rings reunion) and indulges himself in western iconography to such a degree that you kind of wish he’d designed this movie, then found a better script to go with it. And maybe hired a better director to make the action come off. As it is, Priest is about five beads shy of a rosary.

— The Orlando Sentinal

 

Other voices

Selected excerpts from reviews of Priest.

Doesn’t have a prayer.

— Ray Bennett, Hollywood Reporter

A mélange of apocalyptic western, gothic horror and vampire action movie, Priest won’t win any awards for originality. Still, it’s streamlined and executed well enough to earn a tip of the cap from those in its target demo.

— Brent Simon, Screen International

Did Paul Bettany know, when he donned the cowl of the albino monk in The Da Vinci Code, that he would soon be typecast as Hollywood’s go-to guy for God-bothering multiplex action movies?

— Tom Huddleston, Time Out

At best, Priest is a passable time-waster. Mostly, it’s like watching an extended Gorillaz video.

— Eliott Noble, Sky Movies

Not exactly an unholy mess, but still a rather too pious retread of classic sci-fi/action/horror riffs that lacks originality or pizzazz.

— Leslie Felperin, Variety

Drab, eye-rollingly stupid and with noisy effects designed to drown out audience snores, Priest is about as bad as it gets.

— David Edwards, Daily Mirror

Priest is stylishly conceived and has the odd decent action sequence but it’s also derivative, curiously flat and neither as scary nor as much fun as it should have been.

— Matthew Turner, ViewLondon

Clawing away under its 3-D dinge and slick but desensitizing effects, the movie is deadly, even when it’s cool — a comic-book adaptation ruthlessly shorn of the word “comic.”

— Tim Robey, Daily Telegraph

— Compiled by Shane Minkin