Overall Rating
  Awesome: 14.91%
Worth A Look: 23.6%
Average: 20.5%
Pretty Bad: 9.94%
Total Crap: 31.06%
6 reviews, 125 user ratings
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| I Am Legend |
by Peter Sobczynski
"Big Willie Takes Back Manhattan"
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“I Am Legend” is a film that seems to have been made by and for people who felt that “I Robot,” the last attempt to transform a classic of sci-fi literature into a large-budget Will Smith blockbuster, was just too intellectual and oblique for their tastes. This is the third time that Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel has been brought to the big screen (the previous attempts were 1964's “The Last Man on Earth” and 1973's “The Omega Man”) but once again, it has been adapted by people who have perversely decided to junk most of the story (which would make for a great film in its original form) in order to make room for “improvements” that only serve to dumb down the material in order to make it more palatable for viewers with short attention spans and an aversion to films that don’t offer up elaborate special effects sequences every few minutes or so.In the not-too-distant future, a genius scientist (Emma Thompson in an unbilled cameo) rejiggers the measles virus and miraculously comes up with a cure for cancer. Alas, in a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease, this new virus unexpectedly mutates and infects virtually the planet’s entire population with a new disease that transforms them into creatures that spend their evenings (exposure to daylight causes them to disintegrate) mindlessly killing the few uninfected people still roaming about. After three years, it appears that the uninfected population has been reduced to Robert Neville (Will Smith), a genius scientist who had been humanity’s last great hope for finding a cure for the disease before everything went to hell. Now he spends his nights barricaded inside of his townhouse and his days roaming the streets of Manhattan with his faithful dog while gathering supplies, sending out radio messages to any other possible survivors and continuing his work on discovering the cure that he once promised to find. Although he tries to keep himself busy, it is clear that the possibility of being the last man on Earth is beginning to drive him crazy–at the very least, it has driven him to watch “Shrek” so many times that he can repeat every line of dialogue verbatim–and after yet another setback, he finds himself on the brink of suicide.
Luckily for both him and the movie, he doesn’t go through with it because it is just at that point that two significant developments kick in. The first is the sudden arrival of Anna (Alice Braga) and Ethan (Charlie Tahan), a pair of uninfected survivors who are heading to Vermont where a colony for fellow uninfected types has supposedly been established. The pair want Neville to go with him but he inexplicably refuses–he insists that there are no other survivors out there and even if there were, he needs to stay behind to continue in his increasingly futile efforts to find a cure. (There is also the suggestion that, having been by himself for so long, the idea of not being the last man on Earth is more terrifying to him than the monsters that roam the streets every evening. The second jolt comes when his latest serum appears to be reversing the effects of the virus on a creature that he has captured and brought to his lab to serve as a guinea pig. Just as he realizes this, however, the monsters, who have finally figured out where their great oppressor hides during the night, lay siege to his home in what could be mankind’s final fight for survival.
For years, there has been talk of bringing “I Am Legend” back to the big screen (a version to be directed by Ridley Scott with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead was announced a few years ago and then scuttled over budget concerns) and the screenplay written by Mark Protosevich, the guy who penned “The Cell” and the “Poseidon” remake, has been hailed by many who have had the chance to read it. (It even earned a write-up in the book “The Greatest Science-Fiction Films Never Made” a couple of years back.) However, based on the results seen here, either that fabled screenplay was “improved” beyond recognition in its journey from the page to the screen (a good possibility when you consider that uber-hack Akiva Goldsman now shares the screenwriting credit) or it was never that good in the first place. It isn’t the fact that it varies so wildly from the source material–after all, the previous adaptations bore little resemblance to Matheson’s work and they still worked on some basic fundamental level.
No, the problem with “I Am Legend” is that absolutely none of it works on any level. We never get any real sense of what the disease does to its victims (outside of transforming them into Lord Voldemort lookalikes) and as a result, it is impossible to work up any real feelings of fear or dread towards them since they are little more than one-dimensional CGI cannon fodder. The storyline has been stretched and inflated in ways that make relatively little sense from a narrative standpoint–it spends so much time on Neville’s quest for a cure that it never quite explains what he hopes to achieve if he manages to succeed in his quest. Although generally an engaging actor, Will Smith is all wrong for the role of Neville as conceived here. This is a character who is supposed to be nearly insane from loneliness when we first see him but Smith never comes close to suggesting such emotional depths at any point–he just comes across as so self-assured and confident that his ability to save mankind is never once in doubt.. Even as an incredibly expensive hunk of eye candy, the film comes up surprisingly short. Director Francis Lawrence offers up none of the screwball visual panache that he brought to his first film, the wildly underrated “Constantine” and the special effects come across as surprisingly chintzy for a film that obviously cost an enormous amount of money to produce–all of the scenes involving the creatures look as if they were badly Photoshopped in from footage originally shot for “The Descent.”“I Am Legend” is a bad movie but more than that, it is a useless one. There are a couple of admittedly arresting shots early on that offer us a look at a post-apocalyptic Manhattan that has been re-appropriated by the animal kingdom but outside of those moments, there is never a time when the film demonstrates any reason for it to exist. It isn’t scary, it isn’t exciting and it squanders a potentially fascinating story to such a degree that it makes a cheeseball film like “The Omega Man” (one of those Charlton Heston blockbusters that hasn’t aged very well over the years) look like some kind of underrated masterpiece by comparison. The result is an agonizingly uninteresting and surprisingly cheap-looking drag that will no doubt disappoint all who come into contact with it.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=15743&reviewer=389
originally posted: 12/14/07 16:02:22
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USA
14-Dec-2007 (PG-13)
DVD: 18-Mar-2008
UK
N/A
Australia
N/A
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