Buy posters from this movie

Legion begins with the archangel Michael (Paul Bettany) descending upon Earth, having defied a God who is pissed off with mankind and has lost faith in all humanity. Thus God commands an army of angels to exterminate all humans. Now the bible would like us to believe that God displays his wrath by inflicting plagues. In Stewart’s apocalypse though, God tells his angels to possess human beings… like the demons did in films like The Exorcist (which had got its Christian theology correct). The stupidest thing is that angelic possession is supposedly no different than demonic possession. An old woman that can barely walk suddenly starts to climb up walls and hang off ceilings and bite into people’s necks! And the thing that baffles most to an onlooker is how she could manage to stand after she was attacked by a frying pan!

The stupidity is only just beginning. Michael lands up at a diner called Paradise Falls (since it’s the apocalypse we’re dealing with, subtlety be damned!), run by a curmudgeon (Dennis Quaid) who’s chosen to name his son after a vehicle, Jeep (Lucas Black). Jeep’s in love with the aforementioned waitress, whose parents chose to name her after a man, Charlie (Adrianne Palicki)! There also happen to be in the diner a high-maintenance couple with a rebellious skanky teenage daughter; and two obligatory black characters (one a cook, the other a crook… not racist at all!) that you can guarantee upon to die first. And it is this worst possible sample of human beings that Michael chooses to lead against God’s general, the archangel Gabriel, and his army of possessed human beings.

In a film that offers almost every character with a tediously boring monologue about themselves and their past, there is absolutely no attempt to explain why Charlie’s child is the key to the future of mankind. Then again, that is expecting too much intelligence from a film that has God’s defenses being challenged by a motley group of humans at a diner! Invading heaven should be quite easy- God runs out of angels; his general weeps with a distinctly homoerotic undertone; his best form of attack includes grannies and toddlers biting everyone with shark teeth. And finally…God is quite a temperamental fella himself. If you can stave off his attack for a couple of days, he might altogether give up on his plans to extinguish humanity!

The best of budgets cannot buy you a good script. But it can buy you actors. Ask Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, 2012) who always lends his films a semblance of dignity by roping in actors who bring credibility to the proceedings. Except Bettany though, nobody in Legion can carry a line even… and these are cheesy lines of the worst kind.

There can still be some fun had in bad movies, but not when they take themselves as seriously as this one does. If this were a better film, Catholics getting offended with its material might have been a possibility. But when you can recommend a B-grade Bollywood horror film over this, it is the nadir level of filmmaking apparent that is most offensive!

link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=19916&reviewer=398
originally posted: 03/17/10 18:18:34
 printer-friendly format