Priest | On Demand review

Let’s role-play. You’re a well-respected actor who makes his action-hero debut in a vaguely theological take on the end of the world that opens to dreadful reviews and lukewarm box office. What now? If you’re Paul Bettany, the answer is: make another, more expensive movie with the same director.

Bettany suddenly seems intent on proving his onscreen manhood, taking out evil beasties with a perpetual scowl. In Priest, the baddies are vampires, here conceived as eyeless carnivores with gaping fangs who nearly wiped out the human race before being defeated by an army of specially trained soldiers of God. When the vamps return, Bettany’s priest busts out his cross-shaped shuriken and starts to slice and dice, but the church, which rules the Blade Runner–ish walled cities where humans still live, refuses to acknowledge the impermanence of its earlier victory and targets Bettany for extinction.

Working from a series of Korean graphic novels—a debt acknowledged in a nifty animated prologue—director Scott Charles Stewart (who worked with Bettany on Legion) brings the story in at a trim 87 minutes. That leaves no room for tedious explanations but plenty for shifting into slo-mo, which he uses so often you practically expect a message to pop up reading “buffering…” It’s absurd and a little dopey, but Stewart seems to be in on the joke. Not so Bettany, who growls his dialogue as though he’s protecting a piece of raw meat.