Priest [review]

Another Paul Bettany film. I kinda like his acting, the last movie I watched of him was Creation, where he portrayed the rather delirious and eccentric Charles Darwin. While that movie was so-so, I still look forward to his stuffs.

Here, he plays a priest gone rogue in order to rescue his niece, captured by vampires. The setting is vast land, mostly desert-like with ruins all over. The only city 'safe' of these creatures are within one called The Church city, with citizens brainwashed by the slogan 'To go against the Church, is to go against God'. Priests are a group of skillful and carefully trained people under the Church to fight or kill vampires during the War. However, they are disbanded and now lives amongst the citizen.

Priests are recognized from their cross tattoo over the face

Priest (Paul Bettany) then hears about the attack of his brother's family and Lucy, his niece is kidnapped. Torn between obeying the Law of The Church and rescuing his own blood and flesh, he then ventures into the wild with fellow cop to find his niece. The Church then sends out a group of Priests to go after him, to bring him back alive or dead.

the landscape

The sidekick

are vampires supposed to look like this?

The design for the vamps are pretty decent, if you ask me, it's alien-like though. Gone are the olden vamps, they still retain the fangs, much much longer than normal human vamps, but these are shall I say, the renewed form of vampires?

The air is so bad they need masks!

Am I the only one supporting the priest turned into vampire? The villain looks much better. So I just realized that there's no such thing as human vampires till the existence of THIS first one in their world. So does this mean...this vamp is the ancestor of all vamps later on? For example, twilight vamps? lol...

Love those fangs!

But anyways, fighting scenes are coordinated quite alright. SO much better than Hanna. Love those slow motion ones.

Join me to produce more human vamps...

C'mon babeehh....

The script isn't the best though. There are some pretty lame lines...like when the sidekick shot the roof to let some sunlight in to burn these minions, the priest's best line to him was:

You'd have made a good priest

What's with that? Are priests supposed to be so restrained till their choice of words are so limited? Blame the clergy for that.

Look who's come for rescue

Oh how disappointed I was when the human vamp died! Dying in explosion is such a bad way to die in! I was hoping for something much more honorable or just at least, magnificent? But to see him engulfed in the fake-ish CG made fire was so unsatisfying.

How can  you die like this?!

But I shall be convinced that he is not dead yet. I won't be surprised if there's a Priest 2. 

Rating:

4/5 (vamps, priests, and good looking human-vamp, the origin of all human vampires in the decades to follow..what else do you want?)