dir: Francis Lawrence
2007
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 s****ts 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 re****ter, speaking in a stammering fa****on
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 90 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 bug****ingly 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.
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 **** 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 the IMAX, I can safely say that this flick was a waste of time
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 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
Sandro - 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.
--
"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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