Review: Priest

Grade: C
The Good: Serviceable actioner with a some occasional thrills

The Bad: Bland and generally uninspired with wooden characters and now true creative spark to make it stand out from any other gloomy sci-fi action flick

The Ugly: The master vamps, the dialogue, and the wire-fu.

Priest is a Korean graphic novel, or manhwa, series by writer-artist Min Woo Hyung about an undead holy man who hunts vampires in a post-apocalyptic frontier. It hearkens to classic Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns with a heavy dose of the supernatural and the pseudo-religious.

I used to read this series. Faithfully. I have ten of the sixteen volumes published by now-defunct American manga publisher Tokyopop. The art was phenomenal and the story was dark and ridiculous enough to earn a place in the annals of manga cult-hood.

Screen Gems adaptation of Priest has nothing to with this great series. And it is worse for it.

Priest is a bland, barely serviceable actioner culled from so many superior action and sci-fi films that I spent more time picking out familiar scenes and concepts than absorbing the trite plot.

Paul Bettany stars as a soldier in a secret religious order for the third time—once is a opportunity, twice is a coincidence, three times is bordering on pathology—as the lead Priest. His unnamed stoic is meant to evoke old school gunslingers like Eastwood’s Man with No Name, but he’s mostly a hollow vessel--this time with a spiffy cross tattooed on his t-zone. Bettany’s Priest exists is a world where a vampire apocalypse leaves the little more than Blade Runner-esque walled cities and desolate western outposts with nothing in-between. After the stodgy leaders of Priest’s order, the Church, retire their Super Secret Ninja Priests, Priest, who struggles with faith and the ability to hold a steady job, is called into action, against the will of the all-powerful Church, to rescue his kidnapped niece from an army of faceless vampires.

I’d take time to describe the performances in Priest, but how many ways can one describe deadwood. Accompanying Bettany’s sullen hero is Cam Gigandet--one of many vampire flick/shows rejects in attendance (for those who care, check out how long Bill Compton has managed to survive without being dusted)--as Hicks, a young sheriff out to face the vampire army for his own mysterious reasons. Gigandet shows a hair more personality than Bettany, but he spends just as much time being moody and stoic to make the difference negligible. Maggie Q, TV’s Nikita, shows up halfway through to act as tough girl/chaste love interest. She too has no personality to speak off, so her and Mr. Priest are perfect for each other. Karl Urban turns in a hammed up performance as a former priest turned vampire, but it is nowhere near outrageous enough to compete with the likes of classic villains like Heath Ledger’s Joker or even tepid antagonists like Stephen Dorff’s Deacon Frost.

Director Scott Charles Stewart creates a post apocalyptic landscape that looks just like post apocalyptic worlds from any number of live action and animated sci-fi epics. Endless cities cloaked in perpetual midnight lit only by neon signs, just like Blade Runner? Check. Expansive barren desert wastelands, just like Mad Max? Check. Majority of the movie filmed through a blue filter, just like Underworld? Check. Vampires that look more like quadrapedal aliens than shimmering pretty boys, just like I am Legend? Check. Slick slow-mo action scenes with guns, blades and stylish wire-fu, just like Underworld, the Matrix, and even the laborious Sucker Punch? Check.

I realize no work of art can be completely original, but very little is original in Priest. With a plot ripped out of any classic western and character types rather than characters, it’s painfully clear that “going through the motions” was the unspoken motto on this project. Not to say that there aren’t a few thrills here and there—and they are very few—but most are nothing to write home about, even the climax is painfully anti-climatic. Thankfully, the films pacing is pretty solid with the plot moving at a breezy clip to keep the audience distracted from paying too much attention to the uninspired proceedings. For those in the audience who’ve never seen Underworld, Van Helsing, or Blade this may be exciting new territory, but for those of us who’ve digested a steady diet of stylish sci-fi actioners, this is old hat. And for those of us who consider ourselves fans of the manhwa, this is the worst kind of backhanded compliment.