Priest

If Legion snuck away from the cinema and returned sporting a new hat and maybe a false beard, the result would be much like Priest. But almost certainly funnier.

I've no idea why they feel the need to keep making these films so goddamn serious. Even the subtlest of knowing nods, winks or cap doffs to the fact that it's purely popcorn affair would have raised it above "complete nonsense". Not a great deal above, but still.

In a bid to truly corner the market in glowering religious types, Paul Bettany finds himself in a film about ninja-cowboy-steampunk-priests, and instead of the movie accepting that it's clearly going to be very daft and having some gosh-darn fun, they all scowl through dialogue apparently written by hobos paid with food, doing their worst Clint Eastwood impressions. A string of snappy one liners is consistently delivered without a single trace of snap and horrible analogies are made to Vietnam veterans.

The film wields it's essential features with all the art and grace of a drunk with a kebab. The religious element, critical one might think to the whole priest thing, exists purely as a general autocracy with some eccentricities so as to avoid any kind of point, the science fiction elements are copied and pasted entirely from Judge Dredd, the western ones are all cliches that have been outdated for decades and so keen is it that it's vampires are different that they're not really vampires at all, rather random sun fearing monsters, which wouldn't be a problem, except that the Big Reveal at the end (which they actually bother to set up with a series of previous hooks) is that Hatty McGruff, the villain of the piece, turns out to be an ordinary stinking vampire, which we'd all guessed from the fact that he was a vampire, but the characters have never seen before and the film goes right ahead and assumes the audience haven't either. If a film is going to insult my intellect right to my face, it should least have the common decency to do so sneakily and behind my back.

The outlandish, anime style combat (which it explains are the result of "powers", which are never elaborated on) and relatively impressive monster based action might be satisfying for those in the mood for such things, but honestly the only thing Priest put me in the mood for was not watching Priest.

The long and the short is that Scott Charles Stewart is not a director, he's a visual effects "guy". He's the kind of person you bring in if the producers knocked together the script from a bunch of cliches they felt would sell and roped in a writer (or the aforementioned vagrants) to fill in the gaps. They weren't after a strong movie, or even an especially successful one, they wanted to wing it all together with as little fuss as feasible and grab some of those precious international market readies.