, which also starred his muse, Paul Bettany. And now we've got Priest, a mish-mash of genres and cliches that does a disservice to them all, and paints the Church as the tyrranical bad guys. Not that I'm particularly religious or anything, but speaking solely as a filmgoer there should be a Commandment barring any further Stewart/Bettany collabos. Starting as all movies of this sort must, in a desolate post-apocalyptic future that borrows liberally from the Blade Runner
playbook. A longstanding war between humans and monstrous vampires(only a marginal resemblance to Robert Pattinson) has forced the population into one massively walled city run by the Church. It was the Church who turned the tide of the war with the aid of a handful of ass kicking priests, driving the vamps into ghettoized hives. But when the war was over, the priests were stripped of their authority and became pariahs. Enter an unnamed Priest(Bettany), who asks for reinstatement so he can track down the vampires that attacked his brother(True Blood's
Stephen Moyer), killed his wife, and kidnapped their daughter, Lucy(Lily Collins). Why would they take her rather than kill her? It doesn't really matter, but all you need to know is that it involves a train traveling to nowhere and a former priest turned super vampire who thinks he's a cowboy(Karl Urban). With the aid of the only hot Priestess in town(Maggie Q) and the in over his head local sheriff(Cam Gigandet), the Priest defies Church orders and strikes out for vengeance. Much like Legion, there is a wealth of wasted potential that Stewart fails to captialize on. Mixing so many genres, horror, western, steampunk, and sci-fi can be done effectively, but not if there's no commitment to establishing the rules of the world. Other than a brief animated sequence at the beginning of the film, we know next to nothing about what's going on. Why is the Church so underhanded? Why are the priests hated when they saved the entire human population? If the vampire plan succeeds and they kill the last few humans, what will they do then? Why the hell does the bad guy think he's the bad guy in some old John Wayne flick? There's an annoying lack of substance to the whole thing that makes the 87 minute running time feel like an eternity. They could've cut 40 minutes and never skipped a beat.
Priest actually could've been enjoyable if anybody involved had decided to actually have fun with it. This is the type of story that screams for a bit of campiness. There's a scene where Priest is in mid-combat with a gigantic vampire creature, and the Priestess hurls a couple of stones for him to catapult off of in mid-air. It's absolutely ridiculous, but not that far off from some of the aerial acrobats in wuxia films we've seen like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
. Rather than being so deadly serious the whole time, a little bit of levity might've served them well. Speaking of "deadly serious", what the hell happened to Paul Bettany? I don't know what he's doing here but he's trying to channel some oddball combination of Clint Eastwood and Christian Bale's Batman and none of it works. Either he and Stewart are really good friends or Stewart has some incriminating photos that force him to keep making these terrible flicks. Maggie Q is solid but since she doesn't really say much it doesn't matter. Cam Gigandet continues to be one actor I simply can't take seriously. He's so wooden I half expected his gun to fire sawdust.
One good thing about the film is that it actually looks pretty good visually, which is to be expected since Stewart is something of a visual effects wiz. The guy can't stage a fight to save his life, but atleast you'll have something nice to look at while you're bored to tears. The conclusion hints very strongly that sequels are on the way. Let's hope the poor box office showing puts the kibosh on that idea, because I have to believe to subject us to another would be a mortal sin.
