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I Am Legend film review
I AM LEGEND
Running time: 114 mins
Starring: Will Smith, Alice Braga, Charlie Tahan, Salli Richardson, Willow Smith
The post 9/11 images of a deserted New York, with weed-covered roads and deer grazing in Times Square, are the most haunting element of the apocalyptic I Am Legend. The third film to be based on Richard Matheson's 1954 novel, following 1964's The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price and 1971's The Omega Man with Charlton Heston, I Am Legend features Will Smith as Robert Neville, the sole survivor of a deadly man-made virus that has wiped out everyone except for those who have been transformed into light-sensitive, flesh- eating mutants.
With impressive large-scale set pieces, most notably of dilapidated Manhattan, and a sterling performance from Smith, I Am Legend possesses the right superficial ingredients, but for a film dealing with man's self-inflicted destruction, it lacks real substance, coming off ultimately as just a big-budget zombie flick. With Neville being the only man left in New York after the city was evacuated three-years earlier, Smith is required to hold the film together almost single-handedly. He has a dog and some mannequins to talk to, but it's essentially a one-man performance. Despite Smith's endeavour, impressive physique (which is shown off frequently) and charisma, he is given little help from the script by Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman which fails to keep things driving forward with much purpose or direction.
The most unsatisfying feature is the dubious computer generated mutants who emerge at night and go in search of food, which would include Neville if they could just catch him. Their gaunt, crazed expressions make them resemble the tortured subject of Edvard Munch's The Scream. Any legitimate threat they might possess, however, is undermined by the poor special effects. Their hokey appearance would be forgiven in a low-budget horror film, but set against such convincing backdrops, it's less excusable.
Immune to the virus, Neville spends his days trying to find an antidote to cure the infected mutants. In the forlorn hope of still finding a fellow survivor, he broadcasts a daily radio message stating he will be at a certain spot every day when the sun is at its highest. But three years on, no-one's showed up. When Matheson wrote the novel, the threat of annihilation was palpable as the world had entered the atomic age and become chillier with the frosty onset of the cold war. By shifting the book's location from California to New York, with all the symbolism the devastated city evokes, the doomsday factor is alarmingly real. But whereas the book dwells much on Neville's psychological battle, here the only real conflict he has is with the pixilated predators. And that is not nearly as menacing.
Kevin Murphy
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