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Sounds pretty much like I expected. I'll Redbox it someday.
Priest really belongs in August, when expectations are lower and it can’t compete with superior popcorn fare like Thor. It requires an undemanding audience who can embrace its comic book thrills without asking too many questions. Standing amid its betters, the shopworn, threadbare and altogether derivative content simply can’t compete. Word around the campfire is that it was released between Thor and Pirates to give the studio a good excuse for its presumed failure. It doesn’t deserve such a fate, though neither does it make much effort to escape it.
Loosely based on a Korean comic book series penned by Min-Woo Hyung, Priest actually has more in common with classic westerns than Gothic horror. In an unnamed alternate universe, humans have battled against a race of vampires since time immemorial. These bloodsuckers aren’t exactly Twilight material: eyeless, gray skinned and utterly savage, they threaten to overrun civilization with their insatiable bloodlust. Salvation arrives in the form of Priests – Jedi-like holy warriors who drive the monsters back and confine them to reservations. Having won the war, they now struggle to find a place in an Orwellian future, controlled by a church that has no use for the soldiers who saved them.
From a hastily assembled set-up, director Scott Stewart quickly moves us into a retread of The Searchers. Vampires kidnap the niece of a Priest (Paul Bettany) and vanish into the post-apocalyptic desert. When he receives the news, he defies his superior’s orders – they don’t believe the vampires are a threat – and heads out after her, helped out by the girl’s young lover (Cam Gigandet) and a reluctant Priestess (Maggie Q) who struggles with some very unchaste feelings for her supposedly platonic colleague.
Stewart knows the beats well – including the point where Priest promises to kill his kin if she’s “gone native” and numerous heavy-handed analogies between vampires and Indians. Unfortunately, he falls too deeply in love with his landscapes to give the narrative its own identity. Instead, it pilfers elements from its betters, then gloms together in the time-honored tradition of films with nothing better to offer. A little Blade Runner here, a little Mad Max there, assembled in an effort to create a unique identity. The results actually achieve the opposite effect: creating a bland, generic feel that renders the bulk of Priest utterly forgettable.
Furthermore, its truncated running time suggests that a huge amount of it was left on the cutting room floor. Prominent performers like Brad Dourif appear and vanish with little explanation, and the sheer wondrous detail spent on this world implies that we get to see a lot more of it… in scenes we’ll never see. That prevents the story from attaining any rhythm while keeping the universe at arm’s length. Muddled expository dialogue connects the missing links, compounded by lines repeated ad nauseum to make sure we don’t miss any key points.
Given his background in visual effects, Stewart handles the look of the piece well enough. For all the hodgepodge of materials on display, they still feel of a kind, and Priest delivers nothing if not a believable landscape. Bettany does his best to channel Clint Eastwood and Q still knows how to kick really high, while Karl Urban makes the most out of some very thin soup as the resident villain. But they can’t dent the by-the-numbers storytelling or shake the sense that this was assembled by executives in a room somewhere instead of anyone who really cared about it. Priest clearly has franchise ambitions and the ending suggests a fervent desire to spin a few sequels off if the box office gods are kind. I suppose they can dream. From the looks of Priest, they won’t be able to do much more.
i knew this was going to be a netflix movie from the time i saw the 1st trailer. Not paying $10 to see this. Not venturing back out to the movies until Hangover 2.
Sounds like pretty much what I was expecting by watching the trailers.
I'm certainly not surprised, given Scott Stewart also wrote and directed Legion.
Wow, based off the review, I kind of want to see it now. The plot discription sounds like a good Netflix flick. As long as they don't make all the 3D moments obvious.
I'll give this one a chance. I actually watched Legion when it was at theaters last year, so I think I can handle this one. It does look better than Legion, at least.
This is Rob were talking about, if he gives it a C- then someone who wants to go and enjoy this type of flick and doesn't expect much from it would probaby give it a B or B .
If anyone sees this in non3D please comment back on how bad the 3D shots are in non 3D. While wife and I enjoyed Thor I am sick of the slow mo towards the camera shots.
Too bad... I was hoping this would be stronger... really liked the trailers... still sounds like its worth renting down the road though...