Priest is quite possibly the most unoriginal film made in the last decade. It even beats out Jonah Hex in the over-blending of too many genres and past successful ideas, all crammed into a terrible new film. If I were to attempt labeling Priest, I suppose I would say that it is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi western horror film. The biggest problem is that there is nothing new to be added to any of these genres, and this just makes Priest a big dull mess.
The back-story for Priest is a good example of how ridiculous this film is. A war is fought against vampires, and man is almost unable to win until they somehow find warriors who are priests. This makes them especially good fighters or something, although they don’t tend to use guns. Once the war has ended the priests are integrated into society, leaving one warrior (Paul Bettany) with no battles to fight until he has word that some of his relatives have been killed by vampires. Going against the church on a rogue mission, this priest hunts down the hive that killed his family and may still have his niece.
There are plenty of special effects in this film, which was shown in 3-D in theaters. The action is not all that interesting to watch, but it all looks pretty enough, if that can be said about a violent sci-fi vampire western. There is nothing technically wrong with Priest, but there is just nothing fun about the screenplay. The elements of horror are not frightening and there is not enough brevity to save the film from Bettany’s performance.
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