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'Legend' Devolves Into A Schlockfest

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By CHRISTY LEMIRE, The Associated Press

Published: December 13, 2007

So if we must watch someone wandering about aimlessly as the last man on Earth, it may as well be someone who can hold our attention like the charismatic Will Smith, star of "I Am Legend."

While Smith certainly conjures both pathos and absurd laughs as Robert Neville, a military scientist whose immunity to a deadly virus leaves him stranded in Manhattan with only his trusted German shepherd for companionship, it's the visual effects in director Francis Lawrence's film that truly dazzle. CGI-enhanced images of Times Square, Washington Square Park and Tribeca, eerily silent and still and covered in weeds, provide a haunting setup.

Then come the infected - the ones who didn't die from the virus but rather were transformed into shrieking, flailing crazies who only come out at night. And here's where "I Am Legend" turns from a quiet meditation on the nature of humanity into a B-movie schlockfest.

It's too bad, too, because Lawrence is really onto something for a while. With the help of stark cinematography from Andrew Lesnie, he sucks you into this comatose version of the city that never sleeps. It's totally disconcerting, but, at the same time, engrossing - watching Neville roam with his dog, Sam, and a hunting rifle, past Grand Central Terminal and billboards for "Wicked" and "Rent," you have absolutely no idea what's going to happen next.

Military man that he is, Neville has his routine down cold, with a daily radio broadcast seeking out any other survivors and alarms to warm him when the sun's about to go down. But he's also a human being who misses the wife and little girl he lost during the city's frantic evacuation a few years back.

He talks to his dog as if she were a friend and is polite enough to return the movies he borrows from his local video store before checking out new ones. By now, he can recite every word to "Shrek," which is amusing and surreal - one blockbuster star mimicking others. But he's also achingly lonely, talking to store mannequins as if they were real people, not unlike Tom Hanks and his beloved volleyball Wilson in "Cast Away." For all his charm and personality, Smith doesn't quite have the emotional depth of a Hanks to pull it off completely, but he does make you sense his pain nonetheless.

Then Neville's peaceful if tenuous grasp on reality and sanity are disrupted when he realizes the infected have begun adapting, and aren't just hiding in abandoned buildings anymore but rather banding together to destroy him. Neville keeps trying to capture them one at a time to test different cures on them in his underground lab, but with no success.

Conveniently, there's one guy who's the biggest and baddest and serves as their leader (Dash Mihok, known appropriately as Alpha Male). And conveniently, when other survivors do finally respond to Neville's daily radio calls, they happen to be a beautiful woman (Alice Braga) and her son, who are about the same age as his wife and daughter.

MOVIE REVIEW

I Am Legend **½

MOVIE BOARD RATING: PG-13 (intense sci-fi action and violence)

STARS: Will Smith, Alice Graga

DIRECTOR: Francis Lawrence

LOCATION: See movie times, Page 8, for local showtimes.

PLOT SUMMARY: The last human survivor in New York City battles mutants after a virus wipes out the population.

RUNNING TIME: 100 minutes

ON THE WEB: iamlegend.warnerbros.com

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