I AM LEGEND
Starring Will Smith, Alice Braga. Written by Mark Protosevich, Akiva
Goldsman. Directed by Francis Lawrence. (14A) 100 min. Opens Dec 14.
Consensus is overrated, but the early response to I Am Legend — the fourth and most expensive screen adaptation of Robert Matheson’s classic 1954 story — has been both scarily uniform and entirely correct. What we have here is about two-thirds great and one-third awful, and in that order.
In the same way that the film is divided, so is the quality of its special effects. The deserted, overgrown, deer-infested New York City here may be the most convincing post-apocalyptic landscape ever put on onscreen. We never doubt for a second that military virologist Robert Neville (Will Smith) — quite possibly the last human being on Earth not killed or infected by a mutated cancer cure virus — and his faithful German shepherd inhabit a palpable physical space, and that’s no small feat. Neither is the sense of dread-tinged melancholy that attends Neville’s daily endeavors, which blend the quotidian (cooking, working out, watching DVDs) with the desperately lonely (chatting up mannequins and half-expecting them to answer) and the pulpily nightmarish (buttressing his home against the roaming hordes of plague vampires outside, and also trying to catch a few of these said vampires to run tests in his basement lab and find a cure).
This makes up the superb first hour — superb because it hews closely to the spirit of Matheson’s text and because the monsters are left off-screen. Once we see them, however, the credibility level dips sharply: our empathetic and relatable human protagonist is facing down an army of blurry CGI phantoms who look like refugees from The Scorpion King.
Creepy congeals into cheesy in record time, and while the action scenes are well staged (the creatures’ aversion to light is exploited down to the last sliver) the damage has been done. It’s no coincidence that this is roughly the same point where the script loses its nerve and plunges down an unnecessary blind alley: a tense, despairing character study is reconfigured into a pokey consideration of the divide between rationality and faith (guess where this $200 million film casts its lot).
In addition to being thematically inappropriate, this detour omits the novel’s key twist, a decision that renders the title meaningless — and leads one to wonder: 1) how filmmakers who so clearly understand the strengths of their source material could so determinedly lead themselves astray and, 2) we can put a probe on Mars but we can’t get convincing-looking plague zombies?