dir: Francis Lawrence
[img_assist|nid=742|title=I Am... The Fresh Prince of Legend|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=300|height=375]
You know, Will, you’re really not.
He may be the biggest box office star currently, he may be a good earner, he may be an occasionally decent actor, he may even be the Big Willy he claims to be in his music, but Will Smith is no Legend. At least not in this bloody movie.
I remember The Omega Man with a certain degree of affection, or at least as much affection as you can have for a film with Charlton Heston in it. Both this flick, that flick and another called The Last Man on Earth all stem from the same novel, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. Just because this flick, directed by the guy who brought us the cinematic adaptation of Constantine, uses the name of the source material for the first time, don’t go thinking it chooses to cleave closely to the actual story.
Oh no. Why would you want to, when instead you can have Will Smith talking to himself and talking to his dog Sam for 80 minutes and then killing evil puffy looking vampires for the other ten minutes?
Whilst the initial shots of a devastated and empty-of-humans New York cause the breath to catch, it fades pretty quickly whilst watching herds of CGI reindeer careen through Broadway during Smith’s pursuit of them in a sports car. He’s going hunting, you see, and the overgrown streets are home to naught but deer.
Oh, and at night, the vampires come out.
It’s not enough, at least for most of the flick’s duration, that Smith is the only person alive not only in New York but in the whole world, he also happens to be a decorated military officer, a doctor AND a scientist trying to figure out what went wrong. And we can only assume that he can cook a mean omelette and restart nuclear generators with nothing more than a paper clip, some wisps of pubic hair and a rakish smile.
The opening two minutes of the flick show a scientist (Emma Thompson) being interviewed by a reporter, speaking in a stammering fashion about being on the cusp of a breakthrough discovery that will cure all disease everywhere and probably double as a kick-arse oven cleaner as well. When the film then cuts to a devastated New York, we can only assume that the cure cured everything by killing everyone.
Not absolutely everyone, just 99 per cent of the world’s population. Some, like Smith’s character Robert Neville, have immunity, but the rest mutated into these bald, pudgy and unconvincing ravenous vampire beasties who only come out at night to feed. Presumably, whoever didn’t die from the plague and didn’t mutate was eaten by the bloody vampires.
So as well as trying to survive, trying to find out if anyone else survived, and trying to resist the urges to perform unnatural acts with either store mannequins or his German Shepherd due to his years of isolation, Neville pursues some sort of cure that could turn the vampires back into regular and presumably ugly human beings. We eventually see that part of his daily routines involve experimenting on vampire rats and, eventually, experimenting on captured vampires. He is determined to find a way to make up for something which he may have had a hand in.
The narrative jumps back every so often to the time just before the outbreak goes global and kills everyone, as Neville endeavours to get his family out of New York before the hammer comes down. It keeps cutting back and doling out a little more, then a little more, as if the personal devastation Neville suffers is somehow worse than the deaths of billions of presumably non-American people as well.
Neville is increasingly losing a bit of his grip on reality as well, due to years of loneliness. I am guessing that it was probably toned down in a studio-mandated edit, but there are enough scenes of Neville wigging out to indicate that they (the makers) really wanted us to start suspecting that Neville is completely bugfuckingly insane.
Ever the scientist, early on after an encounter with a big, beefy vampire who seems to not be afraid of sunlight, Neville starts dictating into a recorder that the vampires (or mutations, I think he calls them), are seeming to lose what little vestiges of intelligence and self-preservation they had left as the changes become more advanced. Uh, Will, are you watching the same movie I’m watching?
For reasons that become unclear, or maybe I just didn’t understand what was going on, the beefy vampire shows clear signs of intelligence, planning and strategy, and seems to really want to kill Neville more than just the general lust for blood or brains that post-apocalyptic mutants tend to display. They all do, in fact, and start showing team thinking, self-sacrifice to achieve a goal and coordination that would be the envy of most workplaces.
In one of the few really well done scenes in the whole flick, one of the mannequins Neville talks to when he visits a DVD store seems to have come alive, since it’s appeared at a location miles distant from where it should be. When Neville loses his shit and starts screaming at the mannequin, all whilst the sunlight is fading with dusk’s approach, it is not entirely clear whether Neville has set a trap, forgotten about it and then stumbled into it himself, or whether the beefy vampire planned the whole thing. His appearance would seem to confirm the latter idea, but it’s never made clear.
The upshot of the scene is that Neville starts to lose hope, and thus, like any person around Christmas time, starts losing the will to live. But hope springs up again like an unwanted erection when it appears that Neville isn’t the Only Living Boy in New York.
Smith, who is capable of delivering okay performances in some flicks, and excruciating performances in others, veers way towards the overacting side of the scale in this here alleged epic. He just doesn’t carry this flick the way a lead should. And when he overplays certain scenes, he doesn’t sell the material, he just reminds you what a ham he can be.
For all of its catastrophic premise and the high stakes involved, for reasons I can’t really put my finger on, it just never feels like there’s that much at stake. Made for a fraction of its budget, 28 Days Later managed to convey every single thing this flick tries to convey (bar one glaring and painful element): the scale of it, the magnitude of the disaster, the sheer terror for the survivors, characters to care for, in a way that I Am Legend never really approaches. Here, it’s just one guy living a pretty comfortable existence coping with loneliness, and occasionally having attacks of Action Man syndrome in order to wake the audience up with a few gunshots and explosions. And it just never engages. Most of the dangerous situations he gets into are of his own making, and require him to ‘forget’ what time it is or where he is. The vampires just don’t look or feel that threatening. On top of that, there are a fair few scenes here that could have just as easily been lifted from I Robot, with few people being any the wiser.
To add insult to injury, there is a religious element introduced later on which feels tacked on and is painful, which gets even worse when you realise where they’re going with it: God Has a Plan. As Neville correctly, initially, points out, it’s funny that the plan didn’t involve somehow preventing the deaths of 6 billion people. Masterful planning, that. Would love to see the mission parameters such an omnipotent being has before him/her/it that states when they can intervene, and when they can’t.
The film ends with a sequence of moments so Hallmark Cardian, apple pie golly gosh in flavour and so Norman Rockwellian in image that if it doesn’t make you choke on your popcorn, then you’re a true American patriot. It capped off what I thought was already one of the most mediocre experiences I’d had in a cinema all year.
Considering the relatively few films I got to see in the theatre in 2007 (which is still probably ten times what most people bother to see), and considering the fact that I went to the extra expense to see it at IMAX, I can safely say that this flick was a waste of money that squandered whatever was interesting about its premise. It’s not Will Smith’s fault: the script and the producers just wanted a bland, generic and mild post apoc movie toned down to a PG-13. What’s most obvious is that no-one will ever have the balls to make a film based on the story which actually allows for the meaning the title implies (you know, so that it could actually make sense), where the lone heroic survivor is actually the villain. Now THAT could have been worth paying $20 for.
Another curious element is that seeing it on the biggest of big screens at IMAX actively detracted from the experience. It actually makes the film look less imposing and faker than it would look on most screens including the one at the end of your hospital bed, or the one in the recreation room covered in protective wire that you spend glazed hours eyeballing.
The most enjoyment I got from the whole kit and caboodle was the trailer, or so called ‘prologue’ for the upcoming Batman: Dark Knight movie which played before I Am Legend. In six minutes, the depiction of a bank robbery staged by the Joker managed to be more engaging, visceral, interesting, funny, frightening and brutal than the entire 100 minute flick that came after it.
That’s the nastiest indictment of I Am Legend’s pointlessness that I can make
5 times you could have just stayed home that day and most days out of 10. But no, you had to tool around in your SUV just for the hell of it.
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“What the hell are you doing out here, Fred? Fred, if you're real, you better tell me right now” – I Am Legend.
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