Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
It's rare that Will Smith isn't carrying whatever film he's starring in. But with I AM LEGEND, he's really a one-man show, performing almost entirely without other actors to play off of or tell jokes to.
So it's to his credit that this film works for the most part as both an action film and a contemplative look at what happens to a person not only cut off from the world, but also smart enough to know that he may never see another human being again. Based on the acclaimed Richard Matheson novel of the same name, I AM LEGEND is a smaller film than you might imagine.
Despite the setting of an abandoned Manhattan island and the occasional attack by dogs or humans infected with a rabies-like virus that has essentially killed off the world's population, the bulk of the film's running time centers on Smith's Robert Neville, a military scientist who knows how this situation came to be and is determined to dedicate the rest of his life to researching how to reverse the effects of what was apparently a drug meant to cure cancer. He and his uninfected dog drive through empty streets looking for wildlife (mostly deer) to kill for food, and he's got what appears to be a fairly solid system for going through his day.
For example, he is literally working his way through the nearby video store one movie at a time. He has set up mannequins along his route that he pretends are people he can talk to. And, sometimes he searches for hives of infected humans (that act a lot like vampires) so he can snatch some up for his experiments. Any infected creature can't survive in the sunlight, which means he has multiple alarms set on his watch to warn him when it's time to head back home and lock himself in.
Rather than turn this story into a full-blown action offering, director Francis Lawrence (CONSTANTINE) holds back for much of the film. He's more interested in having us watch Neville slowly lose his mind as he has recurring nightmares (in the form of flashbacks) about how this all started and the last time he saw his family (his wife, played by Salli Richardson, and daughter, played by Willow Smith) alive during a dramatic evacuation of New York City. He spends several hours a day in an underground lab, working with rats and once-human subjects trying to cure this disease, but there comes a point where you wonder why he's bothering since most of the world's population is dead. He's doing it, of course, because if he doesn't try, he'll probably kill himself.
It isn't until the final third of the film that Smith and Lawrence hit the action button, and all hell breaks loose. There's more than a hint that at least one of these creatures has enough intelligence to rally and organize the masses against Neville, and that feels a bit like cheating, but at that point, it doesn't matter. The creatures are scary as shit. Their look and the sound of their howling still haunts me. The way their mouths open in ways that aren't anatomically possible really creeped me out. By the time Neville finds two more humans to interact with, it almost seems like an unnecessary injection into his life. But when you see the end, you'll understand why their inclusion was important.
I AM LEGEND is going to surprise a lot of people expecting non-stop action or perhaps more humor from Smith, but I'm guessing Smith paid attention to the folks who criticized what he did to I, ROBOT. Here, he's playing it straight for the most part. He finds moments of humor, but much of the time the laughs are the nervous kind or the type found around gallows. There are moments of true terror here, like a sequence involving Neville's dog running into a dark building chasing a deer and he reluctantly goes in after it. There also is genuine sadness at work here, but I found observing his day-to-day living as fascinating as anything else in the film.
This is one of the few films I've seen recently that successfully blends a small, art-house feel with a bigger budget and a sprinkling of special effects. The ending may leave people a bit miffed, but it was appropriate considering what comes before it. I AM LEGEND is a surprisingly satisfying science-fiction work that stays true to the tone of the book, while not being afraid to add a little zing in an effort to get the heart rate racing.
Capone
