Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
5/18/11
Any
concept can be greenlit by a studio, and that's how it should be:
they don't just make movies for me, or you, or any other individual and
I like to see a diverse selection of product at the multiplexes.
But when a studio greenlights a screenplay that is deliberately designed
not to stand on its own but merely to set the wheels of a franchise spinning,
one can't help but play mogul and ask themselves, why did they think this
would be not just a hit, but a hit that would leave audience clamoring
for a sequel even before it left the theater? I'm hard-pressed to
think of a doomed trilogy-starter more mystifying than Priest, an
adequately entertaining 60 million dollar B-movie that's the most expensive
production ever from Screen Gems. Based on a Korean graphic novel
series by Min-Woo Hyung, Priest is a post-apocalyptic vampire Western
whose heart lies in critiquing the injustices of the Catholic Church and
our treatment of veterans. Put that on a set of collectible McDonald's
glasses, why don't you? Filled with good actors doing adequate work,
diverting stunt sequences, and just enough food for thought to keep the
brain cells firing, Scott Stewart's second religious horror Paul Bettany
vehicle (following the less-polished but more satisfying Legion)
is the kind of movie the SyFy Channel would make to try to snag an Oscar
nomination. In other words, Priest has box office failure
hard-wired into its DNA. Which wouldn't matter a bit if it didn't
spend so many of its 85 minutes setting up sequels that will never come.
As
the worst animated opening narration sequence since Dune informs
us, in this universe, man and vampires have been at war pretty much forever.
That war led humans into the seclusion of walled cities awaiting their
destruction until (I kid you not) “the ultimate weapon was discovered...
Priests”. The Church trained/harassed/something these unnamed folks
until they had the power to rip vampires limb from limb and win the war,
consigning the last vamps to prison camps and leaving the Priests as a
loathed underclass in a Blade Runner theocracy ruled by Monsignor
Orelas (Christopher Plummer). But there's trouble brewing:
Sheriff Hicks (Cam Gigandet) returns from the desert outside the city with
news for the most powerful Priest (Paul Bettany). The Priest's brother
(Stephen Moyer) and his wife (Madchen Amick) were willed by vampires and
their daughter Lucy (Lily Collins) abducted. The Priest goes before
Orelas and his council to request sanction to rescue the girl, but they
refuse: their power is predicated on the public's belief that “there
is no vampire menace”. So, he goes rogue, joining Hicks on the hunt
while a Priestess (Maggie Q) and two other Priests are sent in pursuit.
There IS a vampire menace, all right, and its point man is a former Priest
the credits call Black Hat (Karl Urban). He is blazing a trail of
vampiric destruction across the outlands aboard a train headed straight
for the city: saddle up, it's time to kill some vampires!
The
funny thing about Priest is that any attempt to describe it sounds
like a mindless Frankenstein of well-worn genre elements, and the plot
certainly is that. But the themes some combination of Hyung and Goodman
have hard-wired into this mash-up world are surprisingly resonant, and
when Goodman gives the actors stuff to play, they do so very well.
Orelas' world is a totalitarian McDonald's theocracy in which slogans about
the unanimity of The Church and God are so relentlessly drilled into the
populace even the Monsignors themselves find themselves parroting them,
and the masses are herded into port-a-potty-looking “confessionals” to
have their fearless leader “hear” their confessions and respond with random
video clips vague enough that the rubes will believe they actually apply
to what they're talking about. When it wants to, the movie has some
interesting things to say about the struggle non-vampire hunting Priests
must face between following God and following the political will of the
Church, and Black Hat has a single terrific scene where he tries to sell
to Lucy the idea that her desire to rebel against her parents is no different
than his to rebel against God. The way the Priests are cast aside
by a society that doesn't want to have to look them in the eye once all
the blood has been let is an impressive mirror of our current struggle
to face the warts and all of our returning veterans. Every 10-15
minutes, the movie stops to revisit these themes, hinting at the great
film that could have been made from them, and keeping this one from sinking
below the bar of “good” no matter how hard some of its lamer elements may
try to drag it down there.
And
yes, some of them are quite lame indeed. Take that opening (please);
it's hard enough that the movie is asking us to swallow a couple millenia
of alternate history without showing us any of it, but the narration seems
to have been written by a child with delusions of literary genius (“and
so it went on like this for many years...”) and delivered by the first
guy they randomly plucked off the street and handed a twenty. After
the movie takes pains to establish that in this world, humans infected
by a vampire bite don't become vamps, but instead Renfield-inspired “Familiars”,
it then spends an astonishing amount of its brief running time with Hicks
pulling guns on Priest (the dude could really have used some sort of name...)
insisting he promise not to kill Lucy if she's been so transformed.
Yeah, because they're gonna make one happy couple THEN... And for
all the money Screen Gems spent on its CGI vampires, they're an unimpressive
lot, not much of an evolutionary step up from the much less pricey creatures
that menace Bruce Boxleitner, David Keith and C. Thomas Howell on SyFy,
and totally lacking in personality. A Boss creature teased for, you
guessed it, the sequels is particularly uninspiring.
As
I mentioned, the cast is solid, does its best when the material is shoddy,
and really shines when it's great. Bettany is an interesting choice
for a stoic killing machine because he soulfullness tries to fill in the
gaps that stoicism naturally generates, and he does seem very much like
both a killer and a holy man. Maggie Q also radiates an exotic sadness
that makes her just right for the Priesthood and she and Bettany
share a great tortured chemistry. Urban's got the easiest role, all
showiness and speechifyin', but he still shines in part because he adds
anger and drive where many actors would only deliver camp. Plummer
and Lost's Alan Dale make great evil Priests, although their wing
of the story is the most frustratingly truncated by Priest's delusions
of franchise. Brad Douiff has a couple of good scenes as a creepy
traveling salesman who peddles anti-vampire potions. Collins does
the best with her underwritten role, while Gigandet (so delightful as Never
Back Down's odious heel) mostly plays to the level of his.
Priest
does have a lot of complicated wire work that makes the fight scenes better
than its B movie trappings would suggest (there are also some great post-apocalyptic
landscapes boosting the production values), and I would have actually liked
to have seen more insight into the Priests special fighting skills (not
to mention ANY insight into how they were “discovered”, a pretty big dangling
issue that seems to be on somebody's cutting room floor). The climactic
fight between Priest and Black Hat doesn't really go anywhere since it's
structurally designed to be that fight in the middle of a movie where the
hero gets his ass kicked but somehow escapes anyway. Remember <wink>
this is a trilogy we're watching here.
While
the ads trumpet the movie's 3D conversion so loudly they're prefer you
to think of the title as “Priest in 3D”, it's yet another case of
how limited the impact of the format is when the actors weren't shot in
it. Yes, some of the effects have real depth, but it just highlights
their effectiness to have them shot in a different depth of field than
the actors interacting with them. As is increasingly the case, it's
the end credits that make most impressive use of 3D, and who wants to pay
extra money for enhanced credits? When exactly are we going to get
past their converted transitional stage to the 3D era early flicks like
The Final Destination and Beowulf
promised?
If
you're not a fan of more than one of the genres that make up Priest's
crazy quilt universe, odds are you'll want to stay far away. I'm
a sucker for this kind of thing, and there's no denying that the universe
in which the film takes place is a memorably grim place. But, seriously,
Screen Gems, a trilogy? Following in the footsteps of all those other
iconic anti-Catholic post-apocalyptic vampire Westerns? Was this
some kind of tax scam? |
