Review: Priest

I was on the Paul Bettany bandwagon for a little bit.  He had a nice run with A Knight’sTale, A Beautiful Mind, Master and Commander, and Wimbledon.  Those were movies with varying degrees of merit and success, but Bettany usually stood out as a solid performer.  His career seemed to get derailed with The Da Vinci Code and this launched a long string on unremarkable performances in mediocre films.  To me, the best work he has done in the past six years is as the voice of Jarvis in the Iron Man and The Avengers films.  So I really expected very little when I sat down to watch Priest – a movie that’s been sitting on my Netflix queue for months.  Despite these diminished expectations, I still found the movie to be incredibly underwhelming.

The premise of film rests on a war between humans and vampires for control of a post apocalyptic Earth where a special order of Priests is the key weapon against the blood sucking fiends from beyond.  So when Karl Uban’s Black Hat leads the vampires in a revolt against humankind, Paul Bettany’s Priest is forced out of retirement to spring into action.

Besides a few recognizable names, everything in this movie feels 2^nd and 3^rd rate.  There’s not anything inherently wrong with that as there are a slew of B-level movies that are incredibly entertaining, however that kind of success is born from a willingness on the part of the cast and crew to bask in the inherent shortcomings of such a project.  In Priest, the production value feels like a bunch of cinematic concessions executed by individuals going through the motions and that makes it difficult to emotionally invest in a fanciful narrative when the performers themselves don’t seem fully vested.

As the lead, relatively little is asked of Paul Bettany beyond reprising the visual appearance of his character from the Da Vinci Code.  His lines are sparse and much of the physical action in the movie is provided by stunt doubles and computer graphics engineers.  Still Bettany manages to deliver a performance that is completely void of any charisma and while some of this is due to the nature of the character, at the heart of any good story there must be a protagonist that the viewer can empathize with and this, he fails to provide.

As for his supporting cast, Karl Urban (Star Trek) as Black Hat is plain boring.  This is a disappointing turn as Urban has shown himself to be a strong participant in a number of action movies.  There’s just not a lot of meat on the bones of this role, but Urban does nothing to compensate for this shortcoming.  Likewise, Maggie Q as the priestess, Lily Collins (Mirror Mirror) as Lucy Pace, and Cam Gigandet as a green sheriff, are utterly drab in their respective portrayals of paper-thin characters and fail to add any entertainment value to the film.  And as for how they got Christopher Plummer to appear in this movie, I have no idea.  Needless to say, not even he is able to rise above the morass.

So in the end, what you get with this movie is exactly what you would expect from the one-sheet or DVD cover - lots of darkness, guns, knives, and church iconography.  And what you don’t get from Priest is also exactly what you probably expected not to get – which is a good movie.  Obviously I do not recommend this movie as a rental or on television, unless you are incredibly bored and the only other options staring you in the face are Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood or Sex and the City 2.  In that case, you have my blessing to proceed.

Standout Performance: None.  

Read More

Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

I grew up watching Roger Moore, tolerated Timothy Dalton, and was disappointed by Pierce Brosnan, but of all the different incarnations of James Bond that I have seen, Daniel Craig stands out as the best.  So it was with much interest that I sat down to watch The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) even though I had stayed away from the novel or the original film.  I had wanted to it during its theatrical run, but the release was oddly timed for December.  It is hardly what I would call Christmas season material.

Besides his turn as Bond, Craig has delivered strong performances in Layer Cake, Munich, and Defiance so my expectations were high for his portrayal of disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist.  However, a funny thing happened along the way to discovering the truth behind the disappearance of Harriet Vanger (Moa Garpendal, Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander completely stole the show.  There are few iconic performances in which an actor takes on a physical and psychological transformation in order to completely disappear into a role (DeNiro in Raging Bull, Bale in The Machinist) and Mara’s work in in this film resides not far outside that pantheon.

The plot focuses on a decades old murder involving the wealthy Vanger family that is as decayed as the trail of dead corpses that have seemingly been following the clan for over four decades.  Craig’s Blomkvist is brought in to write a memoir – but really to revive an investigation into the mystery.  He enlists the help of Mara’s Salander – a brilliant but troubled investigator.  This is a dark world that director David Fincher drops us into and we would expect nothing less from the man.  Everything and everyone is soiled and violence is the most prevalent form of communication. 

This film is most definitely not for everyone as there is a fierce brutality that underlies all the action.  It seems that religious undertones are established in the film only to ensure that viewers understand these values can and will be easily shattered in the most perverse manner.  The film is entertaining – albeit slightly predictable – because Rooney, Craig, and the very talented cast that includes Stellan Skarsgard, Robin Wright, and Christopher Plummer own their roles and navigate these violent, incestuous, and duplicitous waters with the tacit disdain that their roles require.  But make no mistake, Rooney stands out amongst the accomplished cast.

I would recommend this film for a rental.  It is a dark and brooding film that for the most part remains entertaining.  Sony Pictures has already committed to moving forward with the sequel despite its mediocre performance at the domestic box office ($103M), so you can be sure that we will once again revisit the world of Lisbeth Salander.

Standout Performance: Rooney Mara does a great job of separating herself from Noomi Rapace’s 2009 performance in the Sweedish take on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  Visually it is impossible to believe she was Zuckerberg’s lost love in The Social Network.

Read More