Priest - 2011

Sigh, it's so rare to find a good measure in these things, movies are often too long and boring or, like this one, so short they appear an incomplete work, it felt like a summary of the real story. Now, I read somewhere this is taken from a comic book, but I've never seen it, so I talk merely about the movie, without comparisons. It had good moments, and they were the action-scenes.
The plot: vampire and humans were at war for so long, the Church took the power and trained priests and priestesses to fight them like supersoldiers. After the war ended they were not needed anymore.
Our priest (Paul Bettany) was taken and trained to become the best warrior: he left a daughter, Lucy (Lily Collins), and her mother Shannon to his own brother Owen (Stephen Moyer) who took care of Lucy as a father. Now their home has been attacked, Owen is wounded, Shannon is dead and Lucy kidnapped. The Church denies the involvement of vampires, banning our priest from going to her rescue, but he goes anyway, betraying the Church, so they send other priests after him. A priestess (Maggie Q) goes to help him, instead. It was all a plan of an ex-priest that fell and became a new vampire, so much stronger than them now. This ex-priest with the black hat is played by Karl Urban, hello handsome. He did it on purpose to lure them out of the city. I don't know why, since he's so strong and has so many vampires with him there was no need for that. Had him left our priest's family alone, and had he gone straight for the city he would have caught them by surprise and he would have won easily. Anyway.
Lucy's boyfriend Hicks joins in the rescue, but honestly there was no need for that, the character is boring and useless. I liked the dark scenography, I liked Bettany and Urban, the priestess was ok too, everything was designed to look cool, but the scenes without fights felt incomplete, too quick. It's not that it lacks story, movies like this need good action and cool characters more than they need a long story, but the scenes themselves were too quick. After the ex-priest-with-the-black-hat has been defeated, our priest enters a church with a vampire head saying the war is not over, it has just begun:end of scene. Next scene: the priestess says: we'll meet at the rendez-vous point, he says ok and rides away: end of scene, end of movie. I don't know if they cut too much or if they planned it this way, but every scene really needed a few more seconds, no dialogs, just time to feel the atmosphere and look at the characters and feel them. Time to breath.