The Christian Science Monitor
Peter Rainer's review of 'I Am Legend', the Movie.
What would you do if you were the last human survivor of an unstoppable man-made virus in New York City? Star in your own one-person Broadway show? Smoke in restaurants? Walk blindfolded through Central Park at midnight?
If you're Will Smith's Robert Neville, a miraculously immune military virologist who was researching a cure when panic broke out, the choices are grimmer. He speeds down Fifth Avenue in his Ford Mustang while taking aim at wild deer with his high-powered rifle. He saunters into video stores and has pretend conversations with the nonexistent help. Most important, he tries to find a cure for the virus.
The movie "I Am Legend" is based on the famous Richard Matheson novel that has twice before been adapted for the screen: the 1964 Vincent Price film "The Last Man on Earth," and 1971's "The Omega Man," with Charlton Heston. Matheson's core idea is so powerful that it consistently canceled out the clunkiness of those adaptations. The new one is no exception. You may want to laugh at it, but the laughter catches in your throat because the film's centerpiece – a humanless New York City – is so magisterially eerie. (to be continued in The Christian Science Monitor )
MOVIE REVIEW from the San Jose Mercury News
'I Am Legend': Plagued by its monster roots
By Bruce Newman
But after its promising setup, the movie "I Am Legend" misses opportunity after opportunity to be more than a monster movie. With the very real threat of a global pandemic so recently in the air, the movie has no apparent interest in either infection or panic. Or, for that matter, in the idea of closing borders to ward off undesirables; the movie uses this only as an opening for a computer-generated shot of the Brooklyn Bridge being blown apart to keep the "infecteds" in. "Legend" is full of incident, but nothing much ever really happens.
Smith tries to dig deeper than he's gone before to locate the psychological complexity of being so totally alone. But he's a naturally gregarious personality, so every time he enters a room, you can see him looking for a way to improvise a party. This meets with mixed results. You never sense the soul-crushing loneliness in him that the performance calls for, but he's so good at humanizing his relationship with Neville's dog that his fear of the dog becoming infected is palpable.
The plague's infected survivors -- both animal and human -- come out only at night, and are referred to at one point as "dark seekers." But, again, the movie has no interest in how this army of darkness was formed, only in subjecting Smith's character to the customary array of zombie shock effects.
Even the picture's most undeniably powerful visual -- an uninhabited Manhattan at midday -- finally gets so overused that you may find yourself wondering, as I did, how the production really got all that traffic to stop. (continued in the San Jose Mercury News )
