Priest

Priest is bad. Really bad. Hundreds of years after a thinly veiled Vatican and its private army defeats a vampire uprising, humanity still huddles behind the walled cities of a theological dystopia. Trouble is, our hero priest (a decommissioned vampire hunter, played by Paul Bettany) has word that the menace is creeping back, preying on the fringes of civilization. For some reason the church doesn’t care about the possibility of the end of the world all over again, so Priest risks excommunication to wander off and take care of things on his own. What went wrong with what could have been a promising premise? Well, everything. Priest is completely intolerable, a soulless exercise in genre-riffing. But mostly it fails because it’s a superhero movie in action/horror drag. So lots of ponderous dialogue is delivered without a taste of irony against a thunderous orchestra; human characters defy physics and internal logic when they’re not standing around giving each other the Kubrick Death Glare; and our hero talks like he wants to be Christian Bale as Batman. It almost unreels like a spoof movie played very close to the cuff. Almost. Cinemark 14 and Paradise Cinema 7. Rated PG-13