Legendary mediocrity

I Am Legend starts well before falling apart

Mark Holcomb

Talk about having your work cut out for you. Richard Matheson’s 1954 sci-fi/gothic-horror novel is so absorbed into the pulposphere by now that any adaptation has to tread a line between faithfulness to the book and trumping the scads of works it’s inspired or informed. The tropes Matheson introduced in his dystopic potboiler have practically become genre prerequisites, so it’s little wonder that this blockbuster go-round—the third official big-screen version, and the most spectacular (in the true sense of the word)—goes stale despite a knockout first third.

That segment sets up the film brilliantly. A few years after an “elegant” man-made virus has wiped out most of the world’s human population, Robert Neville (Will Smith), a military microbiologist stationed in Manhattan and the city’s last healthy biped inhabitant, scavenges the island for supplies in the company of his German shepherd, Sam. Battling loneliness and an industrial-strength case of survivor guilt, he also conducts experiments to reverse the effects of the disease on “dark-seekers”—physically ravaged, vampire-like victims of the disease who huddle in cavernous hovels during the day and feed by night.

The beauty isn’t in the premise, which abounds with absurdities: Neville’s scientist status is denoted by a cheesy lab coat-and-eyeglasses ensemble, for instance, while Smith’s buff physique is showcased in an extended exercise sequence that also features the Alsatian on a treadmill. Instead, it’s in the abundance and accuracy of detail in the depiction of an abandoned New York City. It’s overgrown with brush and teeming with wildlife, and the illusion that the city is slowly returning to a natural state is both jarringly inventive—one passage has Neville hunting deer in Times Square—and heartbreakingly efficacious; even the cicada chirps at dusk are spot-on.

Sadly, nothing else is remotely as original or compelling, save for a single hair-raising scene in which Neville pursues Sam into a nest of the undead. But once these beasties come into the light, so to speak, it’s clear that screenwriters Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman, along with an army of CGI effects artists and director Francis Lawrence (who helmed 2005’s wan comic-book adaptation Constantine), have simply defaulted to faster, meaner, more acrobatic copies of the infected zombies from 28 Days Later; if this keeps up, postapocalyptic movie mutants will be moving at light speed by 2010. Even worse, Smith is wholly unconvincing as a scientist, GI, dog owner or—in a misreading of Matheson’s intent that, like in 1971’s The Omega Man, is given the hard sell here—the savior of mankind. A likable actor, Smith works best within his light-comic limitations (even if the notion of a black Jesus holed up across from Washington Square Park isn’t altogether untransgressive).

Regardless, an uncomfortable undercurrent of religious intolerance and racial repulsion—if not outright homespun fascism—makes things all the more confounding. In fact, one of the most intriguing things about this iteration of Matheson’s tale is that it functions as a crypto-fundamentalist-Christian complement to Richard Kelly’s more overtly wacko but comparatively sane Southland Tales. Both engage the Bible seriously, if to opposite effect, and each arrives at essentially the same conclusion: God isn’t required to snuff the human species—we’ve got that pretty well covered ourselves. This unplanned synchronicity isn’t enough to make up for I Am Legend’s shortcomings, though, including its switcheroo of Neville from boozing depressive to workout nut and the wholesale jettisoning of the novel’s most inspired device: making vampirism a medical condition and scientifically legitimizing such stock defenses against blood-drinkers as garlic and wooden stakes. (The Italian-produced, Vincent Price-starring 1964 version, The Last Man On Earth, retains these elements, but is almost unwatchably cheap.) The introduction of a pair of healthy, itinerant survivors (Alice Braga and Charlie Tahan) midway through is the final straw, and from there the movie lumbers toward a hasty, predictable conclusion that even manages to mangle the meaning of Matheson’s lovely title.

But even I Am Legend’s familiarity and reactionary narrative tics can’t detract from the dreamy lushness of its initial scenes. An empty, newly verdant Manhattan trumps the walled-off Vermont honky haven offered up in the movie’s paradise-regained conclusion any day of the week.

I Am Legend

**

Will Smith, Alice Braga,

Salli Richardson, Charlie Tahan

Directed by Francis Lawrence

Rated PG-13

Opens Friday

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