May 13 2011

‘Priest’ Review: Vamp hunter in Forbidden Zone

PCN RATING:

 A curious nostalgia came over me during Scott Stewart’s new comic adaptation Priest. Whether watching Paul Bettany’s warrior-monk dispatch goopy eyeless monsters or race across a barren wasteland on a retro-future motorcycle, my mind kept returning to the B-movie cheapies of my youth. Filled with slick special effects, over-produced mega sets and a story hammered out of nothing but genre recyclables, Priest would have been right at home in that period of time between the late 1980’s and early to mid 90’s.

The real trouble is that while Stewart’s movie is visually stronger and less inherently silly than low-rent gems like Mega Force, Split Second, or Trancers, it lacks the most important things  they all shared; a sense of humor and lack of grim seriousness.   When your film is about a Catholic Empire fighting a vampire infestation in an apocalyptic future and your main character has a fearsome cross tattoo covering his entire face, it’s important to remember that dour solemnity isn’t your friend.

The potential for epic silliness or worthwhile speculative fiction exists within Priest’s compelling premise. Humanity has been warring with a race of vampires for hundreds of years and when that struggle finally ended it saw the inhuman beasties pushed into reservations sequestered in the burned-out wastelands while the humans huddle together in fortifications like Cathedral City, a giant enclave that resembles the nocturnal metropolises of Blade Runner, Dark City or Franklyn. The humans created an order of gifted soldiers called Priests to destroy the creatures and now that the war is over they mostly exist to ensure that the Church rules all. When one of these Priests (Bettany) learns that the vampires are back and have abducted his niece (Lily Collins), he betrays his Order and heads out into the wasteland to get her back.

A warrior haunted by his deeds, a homestead obliterated by attackers, a young girl stolen, and a diminished culture hated by society. You don’t necessarily have to have even seen John Ford’s The Searchers to recognize that plot or to know that Bettany’s character is the stand-in for Wayne’s Ethan Edwards. Both men have committed atrocities against the ‘savages’ and both are ready and willing to kil their niece if she’s been tainted or turned by their enemies. While it’s not uncommon for a second-tier pic like this to adapt a popular story for shorthand, Priest never really does anything audacious enough to explain why it chose The Searchers in the first place. The vampires, at least at first, aren’t even remotely tied to humanity and they don’t prove a good correlation to the Comanche people in Ford’s film. There’s no subtext or human thread; the resulting action climax of Priest isn’t analogous to the scene where Wayne chases down Natalie Wood and then ushers her into his arms.

Still, Priest should and could work as a fun Friday night monster movie if it were only a little more willing to lighten up or add some definition to its characters. The spiritual faith angle that sees a religious conglomerate leading the world against perceived evil could be very interesting if it really committed to the ideas it raises. Ultimately, when Bettany rebels it has less to do with a crisis of faith and more a worldly belief (the vampires are still out there, while the Church says no). When he draws the similarly bent Priestess (Maggie Q) to his cause, along with his niece’s fiancée Cam Gigadet, their union comes out of a need to fight monsters, not to explore spiritual fidelity.

Once the film moves from the city to the austere and foreboding landscapes of the wasteland, it changes gears and genres and becomes a kind of horror western filled with big, hair-raising set pieces and comic-book weaponry. These elements go down easier and I was having a great time with the growing camaraderie between Maggie Q’s sleek and severe battle babe and Bettany’s more reserved, single-minded assassin. There’s something stirring beneath the surface of these two but the script keeps pushing it aside.

When Karl Urban shows up looking like Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name, and reveals himself to be the villainous ‘Black Hat’—the first human vampire—the movie gets terrifyingly erratic and stiff at the same time. The pacing is off, the thrills are minimized and the dialogue is so wooden and obvious that one longs for the eloquence of Dwayne Johnson in Fast Five. What’s missing is that flavor of spirit and invention that inhabited even the tackiest bargain basement schlock title. Sure Bettany can weild those cross-shaped throwing stars, but he never gets a line as good as Rutger Hauer’s partner in Split Second, who when faced with the possibility of an alien rat-devil, stammered ‘ We need bigger guns—BIG, BIG guns…REALLY F—ING BIG GUNS!’ Cyborg 2 might have been trash, but Jack Palance still got to sneer and croon ‘If you’re gonna dine with the devil, you neeed a loooooonng spoon!’

  After this film and Legion, I’m starting to wonder if Scott Stewart doesn’t have incriminating photos of Paul Bettany hidden somewhere. With his gaunt, haunted features and penchant for emotionally disarming performances, Bettany is a precious acting commodity that’s all but wasted in Stewart’s poor-man horror opuses. There’s something about the way he carries himself that meshes with Stewarts vision of individuals staging a rebellion against a spiritual tyranny, but then the films squander his war-weary renegades. The problem is that he, as well as co-stars Maggie Q, Christopher Plummer and Karl Urban are left to the wilderness in Priest—they are embodying types not characters, and there’s little room for nuance and variation amidst all the sound and fury and speeding action scenes.

Stewart demonstrates here in a way he did not with Legion that he has the technical sensibilities and attention-to-detail necessary to master genre fiction. However, his instincts as a director and storyteller are terribly lacking. He tries to cover up the fractured narrative with stone-faced sincerity and that ruptures on him too. Mixing and matching the action scenes to create a fresh rhythm backfires because the film’s dramatic DNA doesn’t support it. We shouldn’t be attacking the monster’s main nest in the middle of the film and  ending on a wire-fu fight atop a barreling train. There’s a lot here for genre fans to savor, but it’s more like sampling the food at one of those wholesale clubs; tasty, yes, a worthwhile meal, no.

   

  

By Nathan • Featured, Films • 4 • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,