Review: 'Priest' is a melting pot of genre slop.

Crowded with supernatural themes and dreary post-apocalyptic imagery, Scott Stewart’s Priest, based on the Korean comic series by Min-Woo Hyung, is so mechanical and ambitionless that even its initially provocative mixture of genres and styles soon becomes routine.

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As explained in a peculiar animated prologue, a war between humans and vampires is now at an end (thanks to the church-ordained, skilled-in-vampire combat “priests”), with the humans living in walled cities under the sanction of the church and the remaining vampires herded into reservations.

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The priests, including our man Paul Bettany, were disbanded by the church that created them after the war for fear of their power, but now after an apparent (although denied by the church) vampire attack in the outlying town (in which Priest’s brother is wounded and his niece, Lucy, is taken), he futilely request permission to track her down.

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Deciding then to go against the church, Priest is excommunicated and accompanied by Sherriff Hicks (a terribly brash Cam Gigandet), who also has a vested interest in Lucy – a boyhood crush.

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He and Priest set out to find her, where they encounter shoddy CG vampires, token sand-swept deserts, blatant John Ford overtones and a dreadfully hammy Karl Urban, who plays the villainous human-vampire hybrid (and former priest) Black Hat with an incessant grin.

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The tepid action scenes are a combination of hokey sharp-edged weaponry and physics-defying martial arts, but it’s not until Maggie Q, the celibate love-interest and Priestess, dispatches a group of goons on motorcycles that anything in the film even remotely registers a blip.

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Essentially, Stewart directs the film like a murkier, spookier Jonah Hex without all of the silly gadgetry, ill-advised facial scars, which is to say that Priest is feebly, fixedly rudderless. [C-]