It is a time of wooa-arh! Some time in the future, humans will be cowering together in post-apocalyptic Matrix-esque cities while outside their confines vampires stalk the Earth.
And not handsome, Robert Pattison types with chiselled jaws and proper manners either, but slimy, faceless fiends that want, as every self-respecting movie fiend does – to take over the world! Standing between the hapless humans and the vicious vampires are the Priests, godly men and women whose ruthless fighting skills and mastery of weapons are somehow not inconsistent with their robes and piety.
I suppose priest’s tunics leave one’s legs conveniently unencumbered if a spot of karate chopping is required. Our eponymous hero is Paul Bettany, whose quiet existence (the Church officially thinks the vampires have been vanquished and has decommissioned its kung-fuing clergy, but we know better, don’t we viewers?) is interrupted when his attractive young niece Lucy (Lily Collins, daughter of Phil) is kidnapped by bloodsuckers.
Alerted to her plight by her sheriff boyfriend Hicks (Cam Gigandet) – they must have a groovy kind of love, ho ho – and helped by an underused Maggie Q as Priestess, Priest must rescue her and also thwart the evil head vampire Black Hat (Karl Urban), a rogue clergyman, by blowing up his train. If it all sounds a bit Western, that’s because Priest takes its cues from oater traditions, with added motorbikes and monsters amid the dusty planes and gorges.
It is similarly violent, though the fights are couched in the standard genre grammar and delivered with the stylised silliness appropriate for a film that’s based on a Korean comic. Importantly, the picture doesn’t make the mistake of taking itself too seriously, or of boring its audience with too long a running time, and everything clips along at an efficient pace. Nor does it shoehorn in a romantic subplot involving Maggie Q, though there is the odd hint that this is pending.
Priest is predictable, implausible and derivative, borrowing liberally from previous Westerns, sci-fis and actions. But such gripes are to miss the point. It does not set out to be novel or profound, merely to be an effective and entertaining flick, one which does exactly what it says on the tin.
With Bettany, Gigandet and Q’s solid performances supplemented by a dash of gravitas from a brief Christopher Plummer cameo, there is no shame in confessing to having enjoyed this devout entry into the vampire canon.