Priest 3D – Review

Praying won’t save Priest 3D, based off of some Korean manwah (comic), as it’s pretty much dead on arrival. A grab bag of ideas and concepts strung together by editing, it’s kind of appalling we have to see this in the summer. While some outright disliked Legion, I found the overly convoluted sci-fi/religious hokum to be a giddy little guilty pleasure, warts and all, but director Scott Stewart’s follow-up in Priest is just down right guilty of being stupidly boring.

There’s more plot in the opening animated interlude, which feels strangely out-of-place, Priest 3D offers nothing to care about or to get excited about. Apparently, vampires and humans have been fighting for centuries, and when humans were pushed towards the brink of extinction, they walled up a city, protected by some apparent Christian Church, and periodically thanks God we’re still alive. In order to wipe them out, the Church invents these bad-ass priests to kill the vampire menace.

The film squanders any potential from the premise, with its tired, run-down cliches used in almost every facet of the film: action, 3D, dialogue, and in its ending which has more faith in itself getting a sequel, than a Christian hoping to meet Jesus. Even though the above paragraph hints at a futuristic intriguing plot, Priest 3D is anything but. Laughably trying to ape John Ford’s The Searchers, the film follows a priest acting against the orders of the Church, who don’t believe there’s a vampire menace, as he tries to save his niece from vampires. Done and done. At 87-minutes, the film feels longer, which is odd, since there isn’t much to the film. Oh, right. It has slow-motion action, which pads the time out.

At least Legion had some sort of of heart and soul to it, no matter how silly it was, Priest 3D is a dull bastard of wasted potential. It wastes the bad-ass Karl Urban as the villain, it wastes anything interesting to say about its Totalitarian attitudes of the Church, it wastes its neat Blade Runner-like setting, and ultimately, it wastes your money. Just say halleluiah, halleluiah, that I’m saving you some money. Amen to that, huh?

Rating: