I Am Legend

Starring:  Will Smith, his dog
Rating:  2-1/2 stars (out of 4)

Will Smith stars in the #1 movie in the country (his 7th straight #1 release, and 11th all-time), a post-apocalyptic horror sci-fi drama meld that requires a lot of him, since he's the only actor we see for the vast majority of the film.  And for the most part, he - and the movie - pull it off.  The story is pretty great, even if the resolution is completely contrived, and the combination of loneliness, desperation, and fear that pervades the first half of the movie is very well done.  I'm not a huge Smith fan (I can't name a single movie of his that I really loved other than Enemy of the State) and I don't think he does a great acting job here -- some of the emotions he tries to pull off are beyond him, but that being said, he does fine in a very demanding role.  And he certainly has enough personality to occupy the screen for 100 minutes, nearly solo.  But the movie kind of lags at points and then seems to rush through the ending, which detracted from my overall enjoyment.  I think the editing was strange, and the director couldn't quite decide whether this was a horror film, a sci-fi musing, a drama about a man breaking down at the edges, or a polemic about science, technology, and religion.  When the frames sort of veer towards the latter, they really lost me.  Perhaps that was the only way for the film to be resolved, but it didn't necessarily work for me. 

I Am Legend is based on the classic horror novel of the same name by Richard Matheson, a legendary writer from the '50s whom Stephen King says was a major influence.  There were two previous attempts to turn the book into a film, one in the '60s and one in the '70s, and both squarely in the "camp" category with low production values.  This modern version, set in NYC in 2008/11 (as opposed to the novel set in Southern California in 1972/75), has much higher production values and the direction is generally good, if not spectacular.  We open with a shot of Emma Thompson speaking on an interview program about a recent medical advance which seems to have cured cancer.  I wasn't sure I was in the correct theater at first, because I was surprised Ms. Thompson would appear in such a small cameo, but that is about all we see of her, and then we break to 3 years later, in a destroyed and desolate New York, where almost all of the earth's population has been decimated by a virus that apparently mutated out of the cancer cure.  We break to a shot of Will Smith and his dog motoring along midtown Manhattan at high speeds, chasing -- well, deer -- which is certainly an interesting image, or would have been if it hadn't been shown in commercials nonstop for the past month.  And these opening shots of an empty New York are pretty cool, but not nearly as well-done as the empty shots of London that open 28 Days Later, a movie this film sadly pales in comparison to.

Smith plays Robert Neville, a scientist who was at the forefront of the attempts to isolate and/or destroy the virus during the outbreak phase (which differs from his role in the book, a novel I'm about halfway through reading, though that's also been rather disappointing).  There are several flashbacks to three years earlier, when New York is being quarantined and Neville is trying to get his wife, child, and dog off the island under military escort.  These are highly tense and well-done scenes, but ones that reminded me too much of the chaos at the beginning of War of the Worlds, so again, this movie suffers from coming a little too late to the "end of the world, big cities destroyed" motif. 

The highlights of the film come in the way Neville goes about his day -- his interactions with the dog, his gradual loss of sanity due to increasing loneliness and frustration with his attempts to find a cure and/or another live human (he seems to be the only one who was immune to the virus), and of course, most of all, his interactions with the "dark seekers."  I don't want to give anything more away, except to say that like the zombies of 28 Days Later, or the vampires of the book version of this story, there are some people who "survived" the virus only to turn into a new version of the undead, and Neville spends his days in sunlight and nights locked down inside his expansive brownstone to avoid them.  The tension that builds early in the film before we ever see (or learn) about these creatures is pretty good, and the scene where the dog follows a chased deer into a dark tunnel, forcing Neville to follow, is pretty great.  But this horror aspect seems thoroughly underdeveloped, which is disappointing.  I was scared shitless by the "zombies on acid" in the early scenes of 28 Days Later, but that fear is not present in this film.  The scene on the pier towards the end comes closest, but it wasn't quite enough.

All in all, this was a decent film, and Smith does a fine job, but with the slate of recent films covering similar subjects, some done quite better, the originality of the idea lags, and there's not enough in the rest of the movie to set it apart.  Nice attempt, and really, the movie flies by, but I wouldn't recommend it as a great piece of cinema.  An enjoyable popcorn flick that might deliver a few scares and in which you can ignore the heavy-handed "message" portions, that's how I would recommend it.  And I think maybe Emma Thompson should have played Neville.  At least then a great actor could have carried the movie, instead of just a great star.

Comments

[LegFuJohnson]

Independence Day was tremendous.

[Elmer Straw]

Agreed. Independence Day is an awesome movie. The Pursuit of Happyness is also very good. I never saw Hitch.

[Bill]

I hated Independence Day and blame it for the fact that movies since 1996 (or whenever it and Twister both packed movie theaters) have been filled with special effects and no plot, bad acting, and ridiculous overblown action sequences that are computer-generated, instead of a meticulous stunt performance as in the old Indiana Jones or Star Wars movies, or even Aliens or Die Hard. In recent years, thanks mainly to the LOTR movies, we've gotten back to quality big budget action movies, but there was a long stretch of Armageddons and Wild Wild Wests and Pearl Harbors that I never had any interest in watching. Independence Day started all of that. It was a bloated, ridiculous, horribly acted special effects fest that is only enjoyable on a comedic level.

[President Thomas J. Whitmore]

And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: "We will not go quietly into the night!" We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!

[LegFuJohnson]

Twister was dumb.

Let's chase a tornado. We're too close, hold on!
(repeat)

ID4 had a plot. We had to save the world.