The people responsible for Priest managed to adapt a brutally violent, humorless, blasphemous comic into an equally humorless movie, while severely watering down the violence and blasphemy and discarding everything that made the comic unique and interesting. The comic is about a priest named Ivan Isaacs who sells his soul to one demon in exchange for the power to fight a bunch of other demons. It takes place in the Old West, and has a wonderfully angular visual style that suits its rough and brutal content. The movie, on the other hand, takes place in a barren, mind-numbingly boring post-apocalyptic landscape (the only locations that aren't salt flats or dank caves are pirated wholesale from Final Fantasy VII and Trigun) and the titular priest is a nameless ninja who fights vampires that look exactly like the Doom 3 monster. That's it.
The characters have all the gravitas of a five-year-old's paper doll collection, and the dialogue is at a similar level: unbelievably predictable, but also lacking any potentially redeeming shreds of self-awareness. The writers' dogged commitment to one-liners that were already cliched thirty years ago might be commendable if it weren't so pathetic. It's just growl this, grimace that, "It's not over; it's only just beginning," and OH GOD SOMEONE STOP ME BEFORE I GOUGE MY OWN EYES OUT. Seriously, the closest thing to a joke in the whole movie was Bill Compton getting attacked by vampires in the first five minutes. The irony might have been worth something if the rest of the movie wasn't such utter crap.
Oh, and if you've spent all of history fighting against actual vampires, maybe it would be a good idea for your capital city to not be shrouded in unexplained eternal darkness. Just a thought.
Christ. I mean, I knew that Priest was never going to be any good, but I really wasn't expecting it to be this bad. It's been a week since I saw it and I still hardly even know what to say about it. In fact, you know how people sometimes tell you, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all"?
This is one of those times. Avoid Priest like the plague.
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