Priest (2011)
Directed by Scott Stewart
In an alternate world, humanity and vampires have warred for centuries. After the last Vampire War, the veteran Warrior Priest lives in obscurity with other humans inside one of the Church's walled cities. When the Priest's niece is kidnapped by vampires, the Priest breaks his vows to hunt them down. He is accompanied by the niece's boyfriend, who is a wasteland sheriff, and a former Warrior Priestess.
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With a screenplay by Cory Goodman and directed by Scott Stewart (“Legion”), it’s shamelessly derivative sci-fi, evoking memories of “The Searchers,” “Blade Runner,” “Mad Max,” “The Matrix” and Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns, among others.
The film shifts from sci-fi-land to a western motif when, a la John Ford's The Searchers, Bettany's niece Lucy (Lily Collins) is kidnapped by the head-honcho vampire, an awfully witty cowboy (Stetson and all) played by Karl Urban.
A sort of futuristic fantasy western with "The Searchers" as its granddad, "Priest" is an action adventure that will attract fans of the graphic novel and folks who like fantasy in general.
The parallels to cowboy movies are both obvious — Bettany’s search is meant, embarrassingly, to evoke “The Searchers” — and vaguely racist.
It appears that turning the John Ford / John Wayne classic "The Searchers" into the church-vs-vampire adventure " Priest " was not an altogether god-awful idea.
If you’ve guessed that the movie plot I’ve described matches The Searchers, you’d be right – and wrong.
With impressive environments that immediately remind one of futuristic sci-fi film from "Blade Runner" to "Dark City" to "Equilibrium," it's clear that we're in for a movie that's far bigger in scale than anything we might be expecting.
That quest, set in a post-apocalyptic world in which humanity has won its age-old crusade against the planet's vampire hordes and walled itself away in a Dark City-esque blacklit metropolis, involves Bettany's superhuman Priest (his face tattooed with a cross) defying the law by venturing outside the city to investigate the supposed vampire-related death of his brother (Stephen Moyer) and abduction of his niece, Lucy (Lily Collins).
This feeling continues on into the early sequences set in a walled metropolis called Cathedral City, a damp, dirty cyberpunkish place that suggests a production designer (Richard Bridgland in this case) who was torn between ripping off Brazil or Dark City , and so decided to split the difference (either way, it still ends up being the umpty-leventh film to copy Blade Runner ).
It's plenty derivative of everything from Sergio Leone Westerns to Francis Lawrence's "Constantine," but somehow all the divergent pieces are combined into something that's quite entertaining in its own way.