Priest Movie Review: A God-Awful Mess

Oh, Priest, where do I begin with you? The film’s storyline takes place in a futuristic steampunk-style world where “priests” are known as highly skilled warriors. Let me really begin by saying that if you’re a fan of the original Hyung Min-woo graphic novel, Priest, then this movie may present a huge disappointment to you. The extraordinary Korean comic, of which the movie was supposedly adapted from, revolves around classic good versus evil in the form of fallen angels, demons and God himself. In other words, it’s all about the church- hallelujah! What Priest the movie has decided to do instead was rip out major parts of the original story structure and introduce their own fresh ideas in the form of vampires, a subject I’m sure we can all agree has become pretty stale at this point in time. The hero of the story is Priest (Paul Bettany). That’s it, not Ivan Isaacs as in the comic, just Priest. I was just as surprised, if not more, that besides deviating into an entirely new storyline, that the characters didn’t even so much as have the same names as in the book. In fact, half of them didn’t even have names. Maggie Q’s character, for example, was only known as Priestess in the credits.

The majority of the movie involved Bettany searching for his kidnapped niece, Lucy (Lily Collins), who was taken away by a mob of vampires. Priest eventually acquires a sidekick, Hicks (Cam Gigandet), who is not just a local town sheriff but also Lucy’s love interest. The script for the film could not have been very long and you can’t convince me that it was. The inane dialogue between Hicks and Priest throughout the whole thing was a disaster and the one-line bantering between the two was more like a cliché driven battle on who could get the last word. What’s really a shame is that the actors aren’t horrible; they just weren’t given much to work with. The bare-bones plot lacked the shock and drama it was desperately attempting to convey, as well, as there was a bunch of “I am your father” nonsense going on that nobody seemed too stunned by. From experience, when most movies lack in one department, like storyline, it usually tries to compensate with another aspect, for instance, some good action sequences. Priest didn’t seem to care much about that either since a lot of the action was a visual effects nightmare. The sequences that were intended to blow us away were far-fetched even for the sci-fi genre. The priest warriors, who have no supernatural powers, at one point jump from ground level to a ridiculously high cliff area in one effortless leap and I’m supposed to believe that? Next time, they can spend less time insulting the audience by not even bothering to edit out the actors’ suspension wires. At least it would be believable then.

I know I’m completely ripping Priest a new one but, I can say that the movie has at least two saving graces which they should be very proud of. One was the actual vampires. Sitting through the Priest movie panel at last year’s Comic-Con in San Diego, I learned a little about the movie and what ideas motivated the director, Scott Charles Stewart, on his decisions. One of the things he mentioned that stuck with me was the idea that if vampires were an everyday part of life, and since this was a movie taking place far in the future, like most things organic to the Earth, they could potentially evolve. Vampires being traditionally night dwelling creatures in stories, and mainly cave dwelling in the film, the need for sight or even actual eyeballs would become completely useless and overall superfluous over time as they rely on their other senses. So what spawned from that were horrific blind beasts that almost could have been mistaken for a Guillermo del Toro creation. Almost. Anyway, the thought put into the creatures was impressive and I found it very smart.

The second redeeming quality was the antagonist, played by Karl Urban. His character was simply known as “Black Hat” and was a hybrid human-vampire, which basically looks like the modern vampire figure most people imagine today. Black Hat seemed to be the only properly put together character in the story and was one of those polished movie villains that become so appealing you start to root for them, even though their intents are just awful. He was the only one whose clichés remarks fit into his character persona perfectly. Besides the alluring tone of the vampire character, the appeal can more so be credited to Urban who played the part well.

You tricked me, Priest. I wanted to like you so bad and Comic-Con had me convinced that I would. You needed a lot of help, undeniably. If you had worked a little harder on being congruent with Ming-woo’s vision, then I might be able to recommend you to my friends but I can’t. In this case, to go against the graphic novel is to go against the film gods and that’s just a sin.

 

Images courtesy of Sony Pictures.