Review: Priest

"I'm so much cooler than Buffy..."

With the recent Twilight kick. Vampires are pretty cool. Like Zombies, Vampire Slayer type films and TV shows have always been around and it seems like they'll never leave. Which is okay, they make for a lot of fun. It's always nice to have a fresh take on a tried and tested genre. Based on the Korean comic of the same name, Priest looked like could have been that for Vampire Slayers. While it does have a lot of good ideas, none of them come into fruition. The few things that do work for this movie, feel far too familiar and have been done better in a variety of other films.

In the world of Priest, vampires are not the teen heart throbs that they are in Twilight. They are more like slobbery monsters. Vampires and humans have fought since the beginning of time. Thanks to elite warriors called Priests, the vampires were beaten and driven away or put on reservations. Now that priests are no longer needed, the Church (which is like an oppressive government) has taken their authority from them in an attempt to work them back into the world. This world that is created could actually be really deep and enthralling, but the film only takes about 10 minutes describing it. If more time was taken to put us into this reality, Priest could have been much more entertaining. Since that isn't the case, Priest just feels dark, mundane, and boring. Which is really a shame.

Paul Bettany plays a Priest that goes back to fighting vampires when he finds that his niece has been kidnapped by them. I really want to believe that Paul is a good actor, he's just never starred in anything very good. At times, he is engaging, but for the most part he is just dark and gloomy and has a lot of terrible lines. The rest of the cast does absolutely nothing exciting, except for silly one liners. Some of the action is cool, but most is a little ridiculous and not as fun as it could have been.

Overall, Priest is boring and familiar. It looks like they want this to be a series, which would be okay. They just need some better filmmaking to make it more interesting.

Makin Movie Blog Grade