Rating of
3/4
It's Lonely at the Top of Smith's Game
Chris Kavan - wrote on 12/17/07
Will Smith joins a small group of actors who can pretty much carry a movie alone. Smith gives his all in I Am Legend mixing loneliness, despair and a touch of insanity to make one of the most memorable characters of the year.
I Am Legend plays a bit like 28 Days Later meets Castaway, though I think the pace, aside from a rather abrupt ending, works better than both. My biggest qualm with the film is that it doesn't delve deep enough into the past. We get a few glimpses of the onset of the virus - but it's very brief and only from Smith's perspective. We get to what happens, but we don't really get a feel of how it spread or how Smith's home became a virtual Fort Knox.
Still, it's eerie seeing a New York deserted where lions hunt and crops grow. Smith wanders the city searching through vacant houses to re-stock his food supply, hunting, gathering, going through every DVD at the local store (he's midway through the H's). His only interaction is with his loyal canine companion, Sam and a few well-placed mannequins.
In his down time he searches for a cure to the virus which has wiped out the earth's population. Even though he believes he is the last man living, the only thing that keeps him going (and his mind from totally running out) is testing for a cure. Subjects are easy to come by, but success is elusive. How Smith came to create such an elaborate laboratory is also left in the dark.
I think the movie works so much better before we meet the vampire / infected humans. The CGI really didn't impress me. The mutant dogs looked good, but the mutant humans just weren't as good. They looked a tad too fake for me, although the more of them there were on screen, the better I felt about them.
Still, some of my favorite moments are nuanced. This supposedly takes place in the near future (2009 to be exact) and it's fun to see how they play with it. If you can watch the opening news crawl at the beginning, it has some fun little nuggets thrown in (such as Shaq announcing his retirement). My favorite is a little site gag that shows a movie apparently gearing up for a 2009 release: a batman logo, with a superman logo superimposed over it. Apparently in the future we're still watching the latest superhero blockbuster.
You should watch this for Smith's performance alone. He proves he is one of the top actors that can carry a film almost entirely on his own shoulders. Not many actors could pull this feat off, and Smith manages to show both emotion while keeping the action top-notch. If they would have expanded on the story along with his character, this might have been a bit more legendary, but as it is, it stands well on its own.
