Movie Review: Priest (2011)

Priest (2011): If you recall my review of Legion, I wasn't such a fan of it. It was a film about the apocalypse, featuring angels shooting each other with submachine guns, that somehow managed to be completely and utterly boring. That film starred Paul Bettany as the main character and had Scott Stewart as the director. Well, because that worked so well, they've reunited one year later for Priest, a film set in a dark and doom-ridden future where the Catholic church has got all awesome and violent. At some point the humans had a war against vampires and the Church employed these soldiers of God, the Priests, to win said war. When the war was won, the Priests were deemed surplus to requirements and disbanded. This film follows Bettany's character, known simply as Priest, as he uncovers the comeback of the vampires and tries to rescue his niece after she is kidnapped, his brother (played by Stephen Moyer, who is smart enough to appear in about two scenes in total) is mortally wounded and his sister-in-law is killed.

The film fails for the same reasons that Legion did: it's just not that interesting. Visually the film is very drab, often taking place in either dungeons or Western settings, which I suppose is appropriate, but that style was done to death rather recently in The Book of Eli. In fact, most of the film can be knocked down with similar comparisons, as the entire film wouldn't feel out of place in the Underworld series. The only thing the Underworld series had going for it was Kate Beckinsale in her outfit and instead in this we get Paul Bettany running around with a cross tattooed on his face. Maggie Q's in it but if you want to ogle her you may as well watch Nikita, which is more entertaining than this film. Priest even takes the whole tedious hybrid theme from the Underworld theme, because that wasn't done to death in three fucking films.

Also an annoyance is the vampires. Why? Because they're not vampires. They're random CGI monsters. They don't like the sunlight but apart from that, they're just icky beasts. In fact, they resemble the Future Predators from the television series Primeval. We do eventually get one more conventional vampire, but that's at the film's culmination and the rest of the film is focused around these monsters and their albino human charges, so you get none of the actual interesting issues previously explored in the vampire genre and instead you get them stripped down to their most animalistic form, which makes for a nice action sequence but doesn't make for a particularly interesting story. The vampires from 30 Days of Night were ruthless monsters, barely human, but you could find motivation in them to explain their evils. In Priest they may as well be demons or hellhounds or magic aliens from the land of ZzogGx 56. They're rubbish.

Priest is a film that has learned nothing from the mistakes of Legion. Paul Bettany is a decent enough actor but he needs to stop making these shit films because there's only so many he can do before his stock seriously drops. He's just doing enough to save his credibility because his performances aren't really bad, but the rest of the film around him is utter garbage. Two thumbs down.

Movie Review: Hanna (2011)

Hanna (2011): Remember in Kick-Ass, when the little girl started shooting and slashing all the bad guys to death and calling them cunts? Oh, how we laughed. That's a bit shocking but it's mostly hilarious, we said. I'm LITERALLY laughing my arse off, rolling on the floor laughing. Well, Hanna takes that concept and applies it to a thriller chase movie, succeeding thanks to a few outstanding performances.

The film begins in Finland, where we see the titular Hanna (Saorise Ronan), a 16 year old girl, wounding a deer with an arrow before finishing it off without a second thought. We soon meet her father Erik (Eric Bana), who spends the first moments of this film looking homeless until he sorts himself out. Erik is training Hanna for something, constantly challenging her both physically and mentally, frequently going over a cover story should Hanna ever need it, because people would probably have one or two questions if you explained you lived in the snowy wilderness of Finland with a hairy man. References are also made to a mysterious woman (Cate Blanchett) who's going to kill her for a reason we're not initially privy to. When Hanna declares herself ready, the chase is on. The film's loaded with excellent action scenes where Hanna destroys nameless military goons with ease, plus the odd moment of comedy as Hanna fails to fit in with "normal" people having spent all of her life as a recluse.

The performances in this film are particularly strong and push the film from what could easily have been a slightly mindless movie into a very intense experience. Hanna herself is incredibly emotionless, like a robot programmed to survive, and that performance is an extension of Bana's, whose character combines the "emotionless assassin" with a fatherly twinge. One of the more bizarre performances is that of Tom Hollander, last seen on your television screens as a bumbling comical vicar on the BBC's Rev, who plays a murderous, whistling, bleach-blonde German henchman, a worthy second in command for any villain!

Hanna could easily have been B-movie fodder, perhaps starring the likes of Paul Walker. It could have been any chase movie, there's loads of them. Fortunately, the casting is tremendous and lifts things up to the next level and the movie never gets boring, it's always full of energy. Any slower sequences don't last an excessive amount of time and you always get the feeling that you're on the brink of things kicking off in a big way once again. Two thumbs up.

Movie Review: X-Men: First Class (2011)

X-Men: First Class (2011): This year is a busy year for fans of comic book movies. In the coming months we'll see the release of Green Lantern and Captain America, hot off the heels of Thor, so X-Men: First Class, jammed in between those films, faced a challenge when it came to standing out from the pack. Not only that, but it was charged with restoring credibility to the X-Men subcategory of cinema following the disappointing conclusion to the main X-Men trilogy and the flawed Wolverine film. Thankfully, Matthew Vaughn has managed to go a considerable distance to achieving that, albeit with one or two minor flaws. And, shockingly, the quality of the posters has been proven to not represent the quality of the movie itself...

This film follows the origins of the relationship between Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr, otherwise known as Professor X and Magneto respectively (and played by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in the original movies), also providing backstory on previously seen characters like Beast and Mystique while introducing new ones such as Sebastian Shaw. The acting from the main pair, Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy is tremendous, evoking memories of the previous performances while making them their own. McAvoy combines Xavier's intelligence with youthful charm, whereas Fassbender's interpretation of Magneto is more raw, less of a "thinking man's supervillain" and more of a flawed superhero, trying to work out the rights and wrongs of the world after being dealt such a poor hand in his youth.

The supporting performances are generally good. Kevin Bacon as Shaw is appropriately dastardly and the additional detail added to the relationship between his character and Magneto is very well done, setting a darker tone for the rest of the movie. Jennifer Lawrence was more annoying than anything, but Mystique in general has never really been that interesting of a character to me anyway. January Jones' performance as Emma Frost is not a standout one either, but she certainly looks the part and contributes more than enough as Shaw's arrogant second in command. Nicholas Hoult is pretty good as Beast, although his post-transformation appearance did get a few laughs - not a shock, he looks like Sully from Monsters Inc., not an issue that can be avoided really.

After that the characters fall into the usual X-Men trap of being rather underdeveloped and ten-a-penny. Some, this is for the best. Riptide looked a bit boring so I didn't really care to know much more about him. Azazel, on the other hand, is a massive man who... well, he's the Devil, basically. Well, not technically, but he's the spitting image of the lad (that lad being the lord of the underworld). I'd like to know SOMETHING about him. Many of the younger members of the X-Men team are kind of annoying in the way that young people are, what with their youth and exuberance and everything, and they fare poorly compared to their superior colleagues to the point where whenever there's a "mutant clubhouse" scene with the kiddywinks you're just waiting for Chuck 'n' Erik to pop up again and be awesome. I recall this being a bigger issue in some of the original X-Men films but it's still an issue here.

Some of the visuals in this film are particularly entertaining, and almost all of them involve Magneto being absolutely badass and destroying groups of villains, be it slashing them up with coils of barbed wire, pulling them along the floor and kicking them in the face, or destroying a cruise liner with the anchor's chain. You'd be hard pressed to find a better example of a superhero being made to look more ruthless and powerful, it's outstanding, and Magneto's cold persona shines throughout, building to the climactic scene with Xavier and Magneto, actually bettering the comics in a manner which I won't elaborate on for the sake of spoilers. If there's to be one defining thing this film succeeds in, it's making us sympathetic for Magneto and it allows us to understand the torn friendship between the two main characters in later instalments.

Overall, this ranks as one of the better films in the X-Men franchise and is a very good film. It still has some of the same issues as the others but they can be overlooked because it's generally good entertainment with some incredibly strong performances from the usual suspects, and the SUPER SECRET NO SPOILERZ PLZ cameo got a big laugh so yay! Two thumbs up.