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.