The opening minute of I Am Legend aims for an "oh wow" response — but succeeds in eliciting more of an "oh no." The film opens with Will Smith as the Last Man on Earth tearing around the vacant streets of Manhattan in a red Mustang, his trusty dog by his side in the front seat, Chewbacca-style. The two are tracking a herd of deer in what passes for a hunting expedition in this virus-decimated city. So why the "oh no?" The CGI deer look… awful. Fake. The sequence then ends with two zoo-escaped lions taking down a member of the herd — and, yes, the lions looked equally terrible (The Chronicles of Narnia proved you could make a CG lion look credible, so there's no excuse for this). And in a film where you know there are CG monsters on the way, dropping the ball on something as simple as normal zoo life makes moviegoer expectations sink and sink fast — not the sense of dread director Lawrence hoped to instill in his audience to be sure.
Based on Richard Matheson's 1954 novel of the same name, I Am Legend takes a great deal of liberties with the source material. No longer an average guy hunting and killing the vampirific "survivors," Will Smith's Robert Neville is a scientist who keeps away from the night stalkers as much as he can while he struggles to find a cure for their virus in his in-home laboratory. The film flashes back to his life before the outbreak, and Smith is strong particularly during a first half that relies almost entirely on his facial expressions and body language over dialogue. You feel his pain and loneliness, and Smith has your sympathies completely.
Unfortunately, the "deer omen" comes to fruition once the vampires are revealed. The pale, CGI skinheads look unforgivably cheap — in fact, they look a lot like the CGI Imhotep in Stephen Sommers's The Mummy (and no, that's not a good thing) every time they extend their jaws to scream (which is incessantly). Lawrence constructs a tangible mood of desperation, but it is undone by the intangibility of his villains. They flit about as if they weigh nothing, and then, moments later, can topple an SUV just by running head first into it. They look like rushed, temporary animatics and not finished products, and Smith seems more alone in the scenes with these creatures than he does when he's actually alone. Lawrence's complete lack of faith in his ability to actually scare you exacerbate the film's problems — the director constantly resorts to the most hackneyed gag in the horror-film genre, the "quiet, quiet, loud" scare, which here is as cheap and overused as the CGI. When the transition between Smith having breakfast and Smith closing the shades on his house makes you jump because the shades are unnecessarily loud, you know you're being manipulated. By an hour in, you're numb to it.
The rest of the film feels very familiar (and not just because the Matheson source material has already been adapted twice), but because more recent films like Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later have handled similar ideas much more effectively. (Boyle also showed that a few extras and some makeup can create much more disturbing creatures than CGI). In fact, the ending (not to give it away) almost seems like a shot-for-shot remake of Days. And where Matheson's title was meant to refer to the sinister twist at the close of his novel (to the vampire community, Neville is a creature of the night out of legend), Lawrence's film gives us a pedestrian and unimaginative explanation for why Neville's story will carry on. Overall, I Am Legend is a wasted opportunity — a rickety, weather-beaten framework around an otherwise strong central performance from Smith.
VIEW FILM STILLS
READ MORE: Exclusive On-Set Visit
WATCH THE TRAILER
