Priest

This doesn’t really deserve its own thread, but the Enjoyable Crap thread is already too long. So, Priest is a perfectly serviceable bit of summer silliness. I don’t quite know why Paul Bettany has agreed to become the go-to guy for supernatural/scifi action flicks. He does brooding quite well, and he has honed his American drawl to the point that you can only detect the false notes on the rare occasions that he speaks in whole sentences. This could almost be a sequel to Legion, so light is the patina of religiosity, so deeply is it buried beneath the action. [How can something be both patina and deeply buried? Dunno, sounded good at the time.]

Anyway, Priest imagines an alternative history in which humankind has been at war with vampires since the dawn of time — we get images from the graphic novels of crusading knights battling hordes of vampires — and has reached the point of appearing to eradicate them thanks to the emergence of a group (how large we don’t know) of ninja-like priests. The vampires are imprisoned on reservations, the Church controls the walled cities and the priests have been disbanded. Then lo, rumor of a vampire resurgence appears, the Church denies it, and Paul Bettany defies his vows to head into the wasteland and do battle once more. The action sequences are fun, Maggie Q. is suitably in thrall to the Bettany character, and Karl Urban makes a cool bad guy. When he utters the words, “we have created something the world has never seen: a human-vampire…” you know all will be well, even if Wesley Snipes is not available to help out. The ending explicitly sets up a sequel. Worth a rental.