DVD Review: Priest
Review by Annie Riordan
Catholics: what we lack in freedom of choice, we more than make up for with crazy sexual fetishes. No birth control, no abortions, no divorce, no gay marriage, but goddamn it, we’ve got rubber lesbian nuns spanking each other with crucifixes while goat headed demons with telephone pole sized wangers plow them from behind with the rabid enthusiasm of a Saint Bernard force fed a steady diet of Viagra laced Alpo. Now I’m not so much for the whole rubber nun scenario – how banal. I’m nothing if not original. Give me a tall, formidable blond in monks robes and cowl, a rosary wrapped around his muscly forearm and a lattice work of flagellation scars across his back. Said blond should be slightly fallen from grace, perhaps with the threat of excommunication hanging over his bowed head and a little blood on his hands. Tattoos are a bonus, especially if they’re religious in nature. Throw some shadows of sorrow and pain in his eyes and BOOM! we’re only a half dozen bean-flicks away from orgasm land.
I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed The Da Vinci Code half as much as I did had it not been for the scene with Paul Bettany stripping bare-ass naked and laying a whip across himself while he grunts and groans and sweats and bleeds on his knees. Nor would the diaper load of ridiculousness that was Legion been as tolerable had it lacked the presence of Bettany as a dirty, sweaty, muscly Archangel Michael, packing an arsenal of phallic weaponry the likes of which Freud would have blown a load over.
Everything comes in threes (pun definitely intended) and Bettany is back, scowling beneath another cloak and kicking ass for the Lord. Once again he makes an otherwise forgettable film at least tolerable for the duration, if only because he does strip off at least once and flexes his biceps a lot.
I haven’t read the graphic novel that Priest was based on, because graphic novels are for boys. I didn’t even know what Priest was about. I thought maybe it was going to be another demonic possession flick. I didn’t really give a shit. I needed a movie to watch and review and – oh hey! – Bettany is in it! Yay for new masturbatory fantasy material!
So, apparently, Once Upon A Time, The Lord of the Rings met some vampires and turned into a Manga western printed over the pages of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. Along the way, it gets on a train and narrowly avoids a head-on collision with Blade Runner, clipping the guardrail of Steampunk not enough to rub off, but enough to show that it was a damn close call. It stops at a couple of depots, namely True Grit, Blade and Ridley Scott’s Aliens, but the cow of Predictability has already lain down on the tracks half a dozen times before we even get that far. Finally, the whole thing careens off the rails and plows head first into The Matrix. The force of the blow causes a head trauma so severe that the movie actually thinks it’s a serious attempt at dramatic storytelling. Poor movie. Someone should have called Kevorkian sooner to pull the plug on this brain dead baby.
Seriously though: vampires kidnap a girl in a post-apocalyptic western style wasteland and Paul Bettany – a Catholic ninja vampire hunter – has to rescue her. The end.
Within the first five minutes of film, I knew exactly what was going to happen. I knew who the bad guy would be. I knew who the girl really was. I knew Bettany’s secret, which is revealed an hour later and lands with an audible “DUH!” on a weary, jaded audience. Seriously, if you aren’t able to figure this film out before the opening credits sequence concludes (an animated affair that makes the old Popeye cartoons look like a Werner Herzog flick) you’ve either never seen a movie before, or you’re dead. Seriously, there are exotic microbial fungoids who have lived their entire lives within the confines of a petri dish who knew exactly where this film was going. And if that were not bad enough, there are endless Matrix-style slow motion shots of kung fu moves, bullets being fired and other various and sundry weapons being thrown with scientific precision through the air. Please, can we please put that effect to rest now? It’s tired and should be put out of its misery. I’ll pay for the fucking funeral.
Karl Urban as our Nameless Bad Guy looks distinctly embarrassed by his plastic fangs and silly lines, but at least he gets to bully Brad Dourif again for the first time since The Two Towers. Cam Gigandet desperately wants to be Daniel Craig, squinting a lot and speaking through a grate of tightly clenched teeth which by all rights should have been splattered with the carcasses of half a million blow flies by films end. Needless to say, he falls a few hundred miles short. Lily Collins is absolutely lovely as our imperiled damsel, and I covet her billowy dress, but she’s not given much to do other than cower, scream and cry. Same for Maggie Q, who is kickass gorgeous and absolutely wasted in a role which has all the emotional depth and nuance of the boulder strewn background. And Christopher Plummer lurks behind it all, possibly regretting his harsh words for his role in The Sound Of Music. But yeah…Paul Bettany is in it. There’s that.
Precious little time is wasted on character development, and the script reeks so hard of cheese that it’s hard to believe the entire cast didn’t die from chronic constipation, being forced to chew their way through the miles of rubbery queso handed them on a daily basis as they were. I may never be able to eat nachos again. Watch only if you’re a sucker for brainless action flicks, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
