(…but it's nothing to do with religion). Paul Bettany stars in this Korean comic-inspired romp, showing on C4 at 10pm this evening. Enhance your viewing with this lowdown
"If you're not committing sin, you're not having fun" - Black Hat
Remember Legion? Sure you do. It was that 2010 Scott Stewart fantasy action film with strong religious overtones where Paul Bettany had to go to the desert to stop some angels from killing all the humans. You remember it. Its trailer had that old lady spider-zombie in it. It wasn't quite as good as you thought it'd be. Remember?
I'm not sure why I'm telling you about Legion, because Priest is a completely different film. Priest is a 2011 Scott Stewart fantasy action film with strong religious overtones where Paul Bettany has to go to the desert to stop some vampires from killing all the humans. Completely different. Perhaps it's because everyone got it confused with Legion, or perhaps it's because everyone has a natural upper limit to the amount of quasi-religious Paul Bettany B-movies they can sit through every half-decade, but Priest didn't do especially well on its original release. However, so long as you're in the right mood and you don't have particularly high expectations, Priest is pretty much exactly as good as you think it'll be. That counts as praise, right?
"There has always been man, and there have always been vampires" - Monsignor Chamberlain
Reading on mobile? Watch Genndy Tartakovsky's animation here
Priest started life as a long-running Korean comic series. And perhaps that's how it should have remained. By far the most enjoyable part of the entire film is Genndy Tartakovsky's animated opening, explaining the history of the human/vampire conflict throughout the ages. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it captures the spirit of the comic effortlessly. Everything, from the soldiers' facial expressions to the gore – especially the cutaway of the poor sap whose eyeballs pop out as his skull gets sliced in two – is perfectly judged. By rights, the entire film should be like this. When it ends, and we're met with flesh and blood actors mumbling glumly in a hut, it's a tremendous letdown.
The introduction of Bettany's character doesn't really gee things up, either. For the most part, he's an unknowably generic blank. His backstory – trained as one of the world's most fearsome warriors to fight the vampires, then cast out into exile as soon as they were beaten – is far more interesting than anything he gets up to during the actual film. He's pitched somewhere between Spaghetti Western Clint Eastwood and Terminator-era Schwarzenegger, but the problem is that Bettany is too playful and intelligent an actor to completely pull it off. You can see him actually working things out from time to time, which isn't what anyone wants from a film about a buff monk who punches vampires for a living. Gerard Butler was once attached to star in this, and his knucklebrowed brutishness would have been a much better fit.
"To go against the Church is to go against God" - Monsignor Chamberlain
By the way, you know that you're all reading this film the wrong way, right? In an interview with Collider ahead of its launch, Scott Stewart went to almost comical lengths to play down the religious connotations of the film. It's not about Christianity at all, you see. It's about the danger of any unchecked authority. You might have just been confused because the authority in this film happens to be called the Church, and the film is called Priest, and the main character is a monk with a crucifix tattooed across his face and the whole thing is so obviously a heavy-handed story about Christianity that you'd feel like an idiot for ever suggesting otherwise. Either way, it's your mistake.
But if the symbolism is duff, then at least the vampires in Priest are brilliant. Surely the hardest of kneejerk reactions against the Twilight saps, the vampires here are genuinely scary – slimy, blind, pod-grown things, as much Xenomorph as Nosferatu. And, if anything, they're only improved by the fact that Bettany explodes them all with cross-shaped ninja stars. However, we don't actually see any vampires until almost halfway through the film, which seems like a dreadful mistake. Somewhere, there has to be a version of Priest that's just 90 minutes of exploding vampires, with none of the allegories or plotting flaws or dialogue that brings this one down. if there is, it's a much better film than this.
Observations
Reading on mobile? Watch the Priest trailer here
• Perhaps because its source material is a comic, or because its structure is quite inept, but this feels more like the first three episodes of a TV series than a film. I never want to see a sequel to Priest but, given that TV is currently obsessed with making shows from films, I wouldn't automatically write off a Priest TV show.
• I also really like Christopher Young's Melody Nelson-esque choral flourishes in the soundtrack. This is a surprise, given that Young is currently Tyler Perry's composer of choice.
• Star of the show here? Brad Dourif, painfully underused as the Salesman. He's in a different film to everyone else. Specifically, he's in an early Tim Burton film. More of him would have cheered things up no end.
• One day Lily Collins will make a film that doesn't cause me to completely tune out for 20 while I try to work out how she could have possibly come from her dad. This is not that film.
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