'Priest' (English, Vampire Film)
Director: Scott Charles Stewart
Cast: Paul Bettany, Karl Urban, Cam Gigandet, Maggie Q, Lily Collins, Christopher Plummer
Loosely based on Min Woo-Hyung’s graphic novel, Scott Charles Stewart’s Priest has Paul Bettany sporting the pallid countenance he sported as Silas a few years ago. But the only things darker about the man of god he plays here are the color of his habit and the universe he inhabits. He is a near-messianic warrior now stripped of his reason for existence.
Having delivered the world at the feet of the church after vanquishing vampires, mankind’s mortal enemies, he is relegated to menial duties and dreams that are a product of survivor’s guilt and post-traumatic stress - a stark reminder of the fact that a system that orders conflict rarely carries the cross for its ministrations.
Operating an incinerator in a complex in Cathedral City, he adds to the dark, polluted atmosphere of the teeming megalopolis built by church machinery. Much like the coarse ash that floats in the air blotting out the sun, the church is everywhere in this oasis of a city and religion is served up like fast food.
There are walk through confession booths where ‘Hail Mary’s are dispensed like Big Macs with an extra side of salvation.
The authority of the Church though, only extends as far as the clouds of pollution the city dispenses.
Further out, under the graces of the sun, are towns like Augustine where the authority of the church means very little.
Ironically the cross, which instills such fear in the church’s enemies instilling fear in them, wields far less power when uniting the mortals who fashioned it.
The people in these frontier towns, while bereft of the church’s controlling nature, remain susceptible to charlatan snake oil salesmen and the vagaries of the wild. It is in this frontier town that the annihilated announce their revival with the kidnapping of a young virginal girl, Lucy.
Through immaculate coincidence or intentional design, Lucy happens to be related to the soldier languishing in the depths of Cathedral City. And this act of terror is perpetrated by the man who haunts the Priest’s dreams; the comrade in arms who he lost in the vampire caves.
Reminiscent of the Sergio Leone’s lone gunman, Karl Urban plays a man in cowboy boots and a black hat, a human-vampire hybrid who is an undead testament to mutation creating a more potent race of creature.
Informed of Lucy’s abduction by her paramour Hicks, the Priest sets out to find the girl, his last remaining kin, after flouting a specific directive from the church not to do so. With the Priestess (a svelte Maggie Q), Hicks and the Priest uncover a more sinister plot by the vampires and the probable plot for a sequel with scope for more gravity defying action. The stylized action sequences in Priest may be its universal selling point and it is gratifying to see the brooding Paul Bettany get an opportunity to flex his muscles.
The visual design and the strange coexistence of science and myth are all excellent.
Strangely though, despite its formulaic development, the resistance to authority that the film exudes is probably its most redeeming feature.
