And the first nominee for worst movie of the year is....Priest!!! This over the top, often unintentionally funny, graphic novel adaptation features some horrible dialogue, laughably unbelievable action, plot holes and general silliness. Truly this is one of those movies where I wonder if the people involved realized how bad a movie they were making or if somehow they'd convinced themselves this was good stuff.
The plot is a watered down, drained of all emotional impact, ripped off version of John Ford's 1956 Western classic, The Searchers. Only instead of John Wayne tracking down a niece kidnapped by Indians, whom he intends to kill if she's been spoiled by them, you have Paul Bettany tracking down a niece that has been kidnapped by vampires, whom he intends to kill if they've infected her. And instead of being set in the American West of the 1800s, this movie is set in some alternate reality future where the Earth has been decimated by a long standing war between humanity and vampires. My apologies if my description makes the plot sound interesting in any way.
While the plot of the movie is ripped off from The Searchers, the look of the city where the story starts is ripped straight out of Bladerunner. The wasteland featured outside of the city reminded me of Planet of the Apes. There's just not much original in any part of the movie.
Although the main antagonists are referred to as vampires, they bear little in common with the more traditional bloodsuckers. They're really just ravenous animals with no intelligence, who look and behave nothing like humans. They secrete a sticky substance that they use to build giant hives. The only trait they seem to have in common with real vampires is their inability to survive in sunlight. There are some humans in the film who voluntarily work for the vampires, but given how disgusting and apparently brainless the "vampires" are, just why a human would want to do this is never explained. Only one character in the entire film resembles what we normally think of as a vampire, but then he immediately breaks this illusion by going out in the sunlight.
But then there are a lot of things that are never explained. For instance, we are told that there was a war between humans and the "vampires" and that the humans won. We are then told that the remaining "vampires" were rounded up and put on reservations, but what we aren't told is why. Why were the "vampires" allowed to live at all? Why weren't they simply all killed?
Even the action is poorly done and often just silly. During one scene, Bettany's Priest is fighting a hive guardian (a sort of giant, really ugly "vampire" dog) and another Priest (played by Maggie Q) throws rocks into the air, upon which Bettany proceeds to climb as though they were stairs, as they float through the air. It's supposed to be one of those movies where you think, "Yeah!", but it's so ridiculous, I just laughed instead.
The dialogue is equally bad. Bettany instructs a young sheriff who is traveling with him on how to kill "vampires" with highly articulate phrases such as, "Focus" and "See point A to point B". The fact that these lines are spoken so seriously as if they are true secrets to live by is again unintentionally funny. When the "point A to point B" line is repeated later by the cowboy in another scene that is supposed to rouse the audience, I again found myself laughing instead.
With its high production values and fairly well known cast, you'd expect there to be something redeeming in this movie, but I'm at a loss to think of what it might be, except perhaps its blessedly short running time of just 1 hour and 27 minutes. It's so short a movie that you get the feeling the filmmakers really did have an idea of how bad a movie they were making and so decided to trim absolutely everything they could from it. For that I thank them, but for nothing else.
