I thought Priest would be bad, but I never imagined it would be an unholy shotgun wedding between Judge Dredd and The Searchers. The movie clearly has it in for the Catholic Church, but it’s the filmmakers who come across as retrograde fascists.
The Priests, motorcycle-riding “warriors with extraordinary powers, trained by the Church in the art of vampire combat,” are this film’s version of the Street Judges. The titular, unnamed Priest is the John Wayne character. And the vampires represent Native Americans.
I’m not reading between the lines. I’m not equating Priest’s vampires with American Indians just because the circumstances surrounding the kidnapping and subsequent rescue of Bettany’s niece Lucy (Lily Collins) are knowingly similar to the premise of The Searchers — although that alone would be a dead giveaway.
I’d love to fancy myself terribly astute, but the fact is that the screenplay makes no bones about who is supposed to be what. According to the opening narration, after the Priests won the war on bloodsuckers, “the remaining vampires were placed on reservations.” The one reservation we see is more like a concentration camp (complete with a pseudo-motivational sign at the entrance), which of course only makes the whole thing even worse.
Bettany hates vampires with a vengeance, and is ready to kill Lucy if she’s been “infected.” Just like Duke Wayne would rather shoot Natalie Wood himself than have her living as an Indian in The Searchers. Essentially, what Priest is saying is that embracing otherness (either unwillingly like Lucy, or willfully as vampires’ familiars do) is akin to contracting a disease.
Now, Bettany and his sidekick, Hicks (Cam Gigandet in the Jeffrey Hunter role), don’t know any better — especially Bettany, who has been literally indoctrinated since he was a young man.
Perhaps an epiphany is forthcoming, and the Native Vampires will turn out to be not nearly as bad as we have been led to believe? Maybe Bettany will realize that his principles have been misguided all along, resulting in a change in perspective?
No such luck. In The Searchers, “the Comanches are depicted as utterly ruthless, [but director John] Ford ascribes motivations for their actions, and lends them a dignity befitting a proud civilization. Never do we see the Indians commit atrocities more appalling than those perpetrated by the white man. Not only does [Wayne’s character] perform the only scalping shown in the film, but Ford presents the bloody aftermath of a massacre of Indian women and children carried out by the same clean-cut cavalrymen he depicted so lovingly in films like Fort Apache.”
Conversely, Priest’s vampires don’t even qualify as stereotypical ‘noble savages.’ They are blind, dumb, computer-generated animals with no more sense than to kill and feed. Far from the sophisticated Anne Rice aristocrat with a wit as sharp as his fangs, these “vamps” have a Queen, but only in the same way that insects do.
To further convey their non-person condition, the villain Black Hat (Karl Urban) is said to be the first human vampire. Incidentally, Black Hat is the only one who has anything good to say about vampires (“I have seen the soul of the vampire. And let me tell you, it is far more pure [sic] than that of any man”), and he and his acolytes are burnt to a crisp like so many heretics, leaving no doubt that they were in the wrong.
It’s like the filmmakers set out to do a kind of allegory for the pernicious effect that the Church had on the indigenous people of the Americas (not just the United States), but got sidetracked and ended up with a formulaic fantasy horror dystopian neo-western wherein the vampires — who once “once ruled this land” as “warriors” and “gods” — are portrayed as a greater evil than the originally intended target (meanwhile, this fictional Church has Priestesses, automatically rendering it much more progressive than its real counterpart).
There are three ways that this script could have gone. 1) Vindicate the vampires. Endow them with redeeming qualities and make them the victims (and the Priests the unwitting pawns) of the Church. 2) Drop all the references to Native Americans and let the vampires just be vampires. 3) Forget about the vampires altogether and focus and expand on the Father Dredd aspect. In fact, Bettany could have been a Judge in the Biblical sense of the word, like Samson.
The thought of a post-apocalyptic Mega-City (as seen in the 2000 AD comics) ruled by a tyrannical ecclesiocracy is intriguing, but Priest barely scratches that particular surface, in the process wasting the always-effective Christopher Plummer in a glorified cameo as the nefarious Monsignor Orelas.
All things considered, Priest doesn’t even have the courage of its screwed-up convictions. In The Searchers, Wayne’s resolve is dutifully tested. In Priest, the hero conveniently gets to his niece before she has, as it were, ‘gone native,’ so the choice that the movie has been setting the protagonist up to make remains strictly theoretical throughout. That’s what we in the biz call a bait and fucking switch.