I Am Legend Review

There are certain times when a book bumps into you and you may say “This would make a cool movie”. This happens to be the case with me and I Am Legend. This project has been floating through Hollywood for awhile, but just recently got going with Will Smith at the helm. I was skeptical with the trailers for the flick as they didn’t really look like any of the imagery from the book, but alas I’d see it. It’s Will Smith and what was supposed to be vampires. What could go wrong with that?

A lot. Let me get the positives out there. The film does a good job of getting a scary, suspenseful tone out of it’s use of silence. I really got the sensation that Will Smith was alone in the city. Will Smith is very good in his role and in general the action is pretty decent. I like the character of Robert Neville and the constant flashbacks as they served to be nice distractions to the flow of the movie.

That being said, I had a lot of issues with this flick, most of them centering around the schlocky, crappy CGI. The vampires/hemocytes/I-AM-ROBOT-esque creatures that everyone had turned into looked awful. They may end up being the least scary things I’ve ever seen. There was nothing scary about them as creatures as most of their scariest moments came when you couldn’t see them. This movie felt to me like they were still making movies for the sake of selling action figures. It was total studio bullshit with small conventions built in to try and salvage a lack of edginess. It’s a very safe movie about the end of the world. There’s two sentiments that should never be uttered together.

I always felt like the concept of putting this story into a city would be a dis-service to the original film and while it didn’t detract, so to speak, from the overall feel, it certainly felt like he was alone only in the city. I never felt like he was the last person on Earth, which is kind of a key point. The ending is just such a let down and really poor in execution. I was dissapointed with this flick, but otherwise found some of it to be decent enough. I feel bad that the original masterpiece by Richard Matheson got butchered even when the movie was loosely based. All in all, skip it until it hit’s video stores or On-Demand. I give this a 5 out of 10 Bones for just not delivering with such an easy formula to make it a good movie.

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