Priest

Priest

2011
Action
Rated: PG-13
Running Time: 87 minutes
Directed By: Scott Charles Stewart
Starring: Paul Bettany, Cam Gigandet, Karl Urban, Lily Collins, Maggie Q
Rating: 3.5 out of 10

Outline

In an apocalyptic future vampires and humans battle for world supremacy with special vampire hunting priests are humankinds only survival.

                                                                                   Review
Vampires have long battled the ideologies and members of the Church. Now that they are at the height of their popularity vampire movies have swarmed the market place like the plague. It is up to us the viewer, to sift through the multitude of crappy films about this menacing evil. The movie Priest is the age old struggle of good versus evil. The vampires in this movie through the millennia do not skulk in the shadows or seduce young maidens. They are content to fight humankind to the death. Vampires have the speed, strength, and blood lust, while the humans have the numbers and the sun. A special breed of human warrior called Priests are created by the church to purge the earth of these vampire nightmares. In this battle for survival the world has destroyed itself and is in an apocalyptic state. Humans basically hide in densely populated towns behind large walls well their vampire foes remain in colonies that they are not allowed to leave. Priest quickly establishes itself as a paper thin action with little to nothing enjoyable about it. The title character played by Paul Bettany shows once again he needs to pick better movies. He is good in the role as the best vampire hunter in the world but unfortunately the role itself is not the greatest.  A girl goes missing and Priest (Bettany) accompanied by a small time sheriff named Hicks (Gigandet) have teamed up to find her as vampires might have been involved. I am a notoriously hard critic on Gigandet for no logical reason other than for some reason I don’t like his look. That being said he was very out of place on screen with Bettany. Priest is this bad ass character that dominates his screen time through calm and mostly silence. Whilst Hicks is this embarrassing young gun hero thinking he can take on the world. Hicks reminded me of a school bully that was all talk and no action. Hick’s rants on taking on vampires and holding his own in a fight are mostly funny instead of awesome. The film asks a lot of the viewer and I found there were not enough action scenes for a movie of this type. There were some positives though even though the rating was so low. The vampires themselves were more animal/bat looking than human which is a nice change from the glittery nonsense of other vampire movies. The vampire’s familiars (human slaves) were actually more impressive visually then the vampires in this film and should have been used more often. The pace was also pretty decent and while the story was awful the film never dragged. The action when it does happen is decent when they were not going overboard with the CGI. For some reason Priests tend to move like Jedi’s in this film. They are blessed with the ability to jump unrealistically and perform moves that physics would never allow. They should have stuck to the action basics in this film and it would have served it better. Hopefully this is a one and done film and we will not be blessed with a second. All I can say is the only way this film could be worse is if the Priests started fondling underage vampire boys. I cannot recommend this film as it was not a blessing by any means.

T Factor + If you like vampire movies this could score higher on the rating list.

T Factor – If you do not like Paul Bethany as an actor this could score lower on the rating scale.

If you liked this film reel recommendations: Underworld Franchise, Doomsday