Priest: Critic Reviews

...society is protected by a band of licensed-to-kill clergy who power up with prayer and shoot cross-shaped ninja stars.

Maybe I'm giving the filmmakers too much credit, but I'd like to believe there was once more to Priest than the tedious, hollow, joyless jumble that's presented here

Its truncated running time suggests that a huge amount of it was left on the cutting room floor.

It just makes me sad to think director Scott Stewart and all the artists under him had high ambitions and substantial resources... for this.

At $12.75 a movie ticket, you might be better off buying the comic book.

Already seems this aggressively B-level entertainment will quickly wither and disappear in the face of Hollywood's A-level events.

The whole thing -- which in less than an hour-and-a-half manages to insult Catholics, Native Americans, John Wayne fans and anybody with two I.Q. points to spare -- all climaxes in a lot of fire and smoke and CGI explosions.

Bettany has little character and the 3D effects are appalling.

An irritating, lifeless experience, so bad it sucks the fun right out of moviegoing.

A soulless sci-fi thriller about crucifix-tattooed warriors battling vampires, Priest is too serious to be any fun.

There are some nifty touches in the big city sequences ... but the vampire-heavy scenes are nearly incomprehensible.

I guess you could call it a guilty pleasure.

When you watch Bettany, you can't help wondering why the hell a talented actor is stuck in such an ungodly mess.

The over-optimistic promise of a sequel will hopefully be one premise which remains dead and buried. For ever and ever. Amen.

In an era where monster mythology has become raw material for all sorts of mediocrity, Priest is one of the best examples of a broad-scale vampire blockbuster.

[E]ven though it's easy to point out how derivative it is in a lot of ways, it's also sort of thrilling in how spare and clean and unself-conscious it is about itself...

A melange of apocalyptic western, gothic horror and vampire action movie, Priest won't win any awards for originality. Still, it's streamlined and executed well enough to earn a tip of the cap from those in its target demo.

At best, Priest is a passable time-waster. Mostly, it's like watching an extended Gorillaz video.

Did Paul Bettany know, when he donned the cowl of the albino monk in 'The Da Vinci Code', that he would soon be typecast as Hollywood's go-to guy for God-bothering multiplex action movies?

Paul Bettany in a cassock with a cross biroed on to his forehead, potholing with vampires. In 3D.

It stars Paul Bettany as a warrior priest in a world in which vampires and humans have warred for centuries.

Drab, eye-rollingly stupid and with noisy effects designed to drown out audience snores, Priest is just about as bad as it gets.

Clawing away under its 3D dinge and slick but desensitising effects, the movie is deadly, even when it's cool - a comic-book adaptation ruthlessly shorn of the word "comic".

There's a wealth of material to be mined from crises of faith and the idea of the church as supreme governor. But it quickly becomes apparent that subtext is too much to ask of a film that just wants cowboys and clergymen to fight vampires.

Not terrible.