Review of Priest (2011) by Meritcoba — 12 Mar 2016

If there was ever a movie with a glaring weakness, than it might be Priest. The weakness dominates almost every scene: it is the male lead Paul Betanny. This becomes obvious whenever someone else walks into the scene, whether it is Karl Urban, Cam Gigandet or Maggie Q. Not notable names by any means, but they yank away the camera regardless.

The priest character lacks that something that marks a hero or anti-hero. What there is buried under a layer of coldness that never gets thawed as there is nobody who can do the thawing. There is no romantic interest or a substitute. If it was meant for us to pity the plight of a priest who is cast aside by a church that has no use for vampire slayers because it believes the vampire tamed, than it didn't work for I could care less about this ice-cold person.

The weakness of the central character is all the more a problem because original isn't a word that we can apply to the plot or the setting. The creators ransacked other stories, movies and worlds of their tropes and fused them together with little originality. So there are cities in perpetual shadows, under the autocratic boot heels of a theocracy on one side and the vast expanses, mostly desert, of the free living(free in squalor that is) in a 19th century western frontier setting. So it is a cowboys mixed with cyberpunk, spiced with a tad of Mad Max and topped off with a wacky horror story.

The vampires in look like demons and their helpers, called familiars, look like goblins. The vampires can't stand sunlight, which should make it easy to dispose of them, but nobody figured out that they could use mirrors to send sunlight down into their hideouts. At some point the vampire transport themselves by use of a train that can been dealt with by destroying the tracks or shooting holes in the train during the day. One of the heroes even uses this as a tactic at some time. But the story won't allow this: it would be too easy.

Ridiculous is also the reason for the existence of this priest cult. Priests using hand to hand combat are established as superior fighters to people armed with machine guns, which makes you wonder why we don't send our soldiers on karate lessons.

Weak is also the vampire background story. It is painted as a conflict of interest between two different races, but the vampires in this movie are just mindless ravenous demons whose only connection with reason is hard to find. A conflict interest there might be, but how one can get to the idea that mindless monsters could have been tamed is never made clear in the movie. It is totally nonsensical that the church assumes priest redundant.

The movie is slightly saved by the main bad guy and the support cast, who do their best with a movie rife with cliches, tropes and bad story telling elements. We have seen this all before and done a lot better.

Totally forgettable.