YMMV / Priest (2011)

• Awesome Music: The trailer for the movie used Two Steps From Hell's "1000 Ships Of The Underworld" as background music.
• Cliché Storm: If you are a fan of action movies and/or anime series about badasses fighting vampires, you will feel like home in this film.
• Complete Monster: The former priest known as Black Hat is a vampire-human hybrid who leads his group of vampires through the frontier, massacring those in their path. Kidnapping Lucy, the niece—actually the daughter—of the film's hero, Priest, Black Hat sweeps into another town, massacring everyone there before taking his vampires to assault the largest city around and kill everything there before moving on to wipe out all of humanity.
• Critical Dissonance: The film received a 15% in Rotten Tomatoes and a much healthier 5.7 on Internet Movie Database.
• Ham and Cheese: Every scene with Karl Urban in it. He takes his part to Raúl Juliá in Street Fighter levels of ham. Glorious, glorious ham.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Karl Urban was praised for his near perfect portrayal of DeForest Kelley's Bones McCoy - now he's doing an unintentional Clint Eastwood impression as Black Hat.
  • The first alien encountered in Attack the Block bears a very close resemblance to the vampires of this film.
  • The larger hive guardian fought in one scene closely resembles a Vulpimancer from Ben 10, albeit lacking fur.
• One-Scene Wonder: He gets slightly more than one scene actually, but Brad Dourif as The Barnum Snake Oil Salesman.
• Rooting for the Empire: The priests are rather bland and poorly-developed action heroes, while on the other hand Black Hat is a badass and wonderfully hammy badguy, so rooting for him is quite easy.
• Signature Scene: Even by people who don't like the movie admit that the animated opening (done by Genndy Tartakovsky, no less!) is awesome, beautifully animated and sets up a level of pure style that the movie afterwards never satisfyingly delivers on.
• So Okay, It's Average: Reviewers noted that the film trusted too much on genre clichés, although most of them also praised its visual style. In general, there is a consensus in that the film is enjoyable but could have been much better.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • A kung-fu priest fighting vampires is pretty cool in its own right, but an undead Nay-Theist priest fighting fallen angels like in the original manhwa would have been interesting to see and arguably more original.
  • A theocratic dictatorship so corrupted and out of touch that it doesn't even bother to give personal confessions to believers anymore, preferring to use video booths with pre-recorded responses, would have made for an interesting enough Dystopian setting on its own. Instead, the movie treats it more as a background villain with the society it rules being largely out of focus as the main characters brave the bland desert wasteland fighting bland desert vampires. Also, rather than following the logical path of playing up an outside threat to keep the fearful masses in line (as real cults are known to do), the Church covers the vampire threat up for no apparent reason other than to keep the heroes underdogs.

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