Title: I Am Legend
Genre: Action/Drama/Sci-fi
Cast: Will Smith, a dog named Abbey
Director: Francis Lawrence
Release: (2007)
Will Smith is just getting cocky about it now. It seems like not too long ago I was just here laying out all the reasons that Will Smith needs to be stopped, for the good of lazy-mankind. Well, you people didn’t listen to me, and here he is again. This time just rubbing it right in our faces with gigantic, screaming font in the title of his newest, self-aggrandizing release: I Am Legend. Yes, Willard, we know. You’re great, we get it. Oh, what’s that you say? I’m being “delusional”, am I? It’s just the “name of the book that the movie was based on”, is it? It was “written 14 years before you were even born”, was it? Ohhh, ok. Well that explains evvvery-thing. Hey, while you’re explaining about how humble you really are and how delusional I’m being, why don’t you explain for everybody what “book” this little ditty (1st verse, lines 5 through 11) was based on. The Brothers Karamazov, perhaps? And how would you explain the fact that talks are already in the works for a sequel to I Am Legend, which my confidential sources tell me is tentatively titled, No, Seriously, I Am Better Than You At Everything. Me, Will Smith, Not My Character. This Guy. Care to explain that one, Mr. Pinkett? Never mind. I’m just here to review this latest ode to your odorless excrement of yours, so let’s just get on with it.
I Am Legend is the latest in a long line of “last man on Earth vs. post-apocalyptic mutant last man on Earth-eaters” movies that officially includes The Last Man on Earth (1964), Soy Leyenda (1967), and The Omega Man (1971) – none of which I’ve seen. So that’s pretty much the end of that. Unofficially (as in, at least not literally based on the same book), both people I saw this movie with told me, separately, that they thought it basically seemed like a Hollywooded up version of 28 Days Later. I never saw that either, so that strand also ends there. While I’m at it, I might as well also mention that in 1801, the Law of Quadratic Reciprocity was first proven by German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss because, again, I cannot possibly elaborate on this for you. Don’t blame me for being a product of your sound byte media culture.
Back to the story. Will Smith plays Lieutenant-Colonel-Doctor Robert Neville, a career decision which proves to be extremely fortuitous when he needs to alternately use his military rank to pull strings and his biogenetic engineering expertise to try to develop new anti-zombie sera with the home DNA extraction buffer and multiplex protein microarray equipment in his basement. Abbey the dog plays Sam the dog (more on this in a moment), and there are some other people playing other characters at the beginning and at the end. The story takes place when, after what was initially hailed as a miracle vaccine morphs into a deadly plague, Neville and Sam find themselves left alone in the aftermath of a worldwide human extinction. By the luck of the genetic dice, Neville is immune to all strands of the virus, as well as to all strands of crashing through plate glass windows, falling several stories onto solid pavement, being thrown down flights of stairs, and having bloodthirsty zombies trying to rip his throat out. So he’s got that going for him.
Throughout most of the movie the action focuses on Neville and Sam, as they spend their days hunting for some reason (which Neville doesn’t appear to entirely understand the concept of) and then going home to eat gourmet meals from their overflowing pantry of hoarded food. Occasionally they break this schedule so Neville can squeeze in a topless workout on his makeshift hallway pull-up bar, because future-New York City doesn’t have any decent gyms or clothes stores. Other than that, they pretty much stay busy with searching for other survivors in the daytime and hiding from the spazzing vampire-zombies at night. Right, did I mention them yet? Well, I won’t give too much away, but basically Neville isn’t technically the only human that survived, but rather the only human that survived as a human. Most people died, but the rest that didn’t were turned into hairless vampire-zombies with anger-management issues and super-scary yelling ability. Occasionally Neville, Sam and the Phil Anselmo Zombie Tribute Band do cross paths, at which points they engage in scary and action-packed first-person POV shooter battles that do not in any way create a visual crossover directly tied-in with the video game spin off of this movie at all, whatsoever, unless it’s a total, total coincidence. Then some stuff happens at the end, but I will leave that out of this part and cover it in slightly more detail in the well-marked, “May Contain Spoilers” section at the end of this page. You’re welcome very much.
Will Smith does another nice job of squeezing in all of his cross-demographically appealing emotions, including: understatedly charming, overstatedly hilarious, sweetly affectionate with children and animals, take-commandishly serious, brow-furrowedly determined, and lowered-eyelidedly resigned to some hard truth. But in case no one else does, I need to say this (and I promise this has nothing to do with my embarrassing personal jealousy of Will Smith): Abbey the dog was the best acting dog I’ve ever seen in any movie and should be the first dog ever nominated for a Best Supporting Actor nod. Unfortunately I cannot make my case without giving too much away, but I urge you to pay attention to this dog if you do go see this movie. Her performance is nothing too out of the ordinary for much of the beginning, but pay close attention and, by the time it’s over, tell me that you’ve ever seen a dog display such clearly appropriate emotional states and body control as Abbey does in her last few scenes of this movie. Tell me that and I will thunderpunch you right on the top of your head hard enough to turn your shins into socks full of powder. But if you really think so, please, do tell me.
My favorite thing about this movie by far was just checking out all the little details put into creating the environment of a future only two years away and devoid of humankind. For all the little touches put into the visual environment, the most effective was what was not put into the auditory one. No mood music, no background music, in fact, no sound in the environment at all that isn’t physically introduced by Smith or another character. The dead silence of the city in the brief interludes before Smith turns on his music or the television to distract himself from that very thing is a much more viscerally effective tool to put the audience into his loneliness than a thousand rehashes of the once-powerful, now-played panning out image of the deathly deserted intersection at Times Square. (And if that doesn’t finally get me a Golden Snobby for Pretentious Sentence of the Year at this year’s American Critic Awards, I give up.)
Some other future predictions worth mentioning: (1) Apparently physical CDs, DVDs, and actual DVD stores will still be thriving in a few years, so, good for you old Hollywood stick-in-the-muds. Turns out this digital movement is destined to go the way of the Laserdisc. (2) Looks like the XM-Sirius merger won’t go through, so invest accordingly. (3) Speaking of investing accordingly, watch out for some kind of disastrous end to Mac in the next few years. This guy had a state of the art biogenetic engineering lab in the basement of his New York City townhouse, but was still rocking a first generation iPod. Actually, now that I think about it, three years without a significantly updated product is probably pretty typical over there. Ok, forget that one, maybe Mac is still chugging along just fine when we all die. (4) Of course, just when everything else finally falls into place, the end of all mankind will step in just in time to once again derail the release of the long-anticipated Superman-Batman movie. This should come as zero surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention.
And, don’t worry, there are still plenty of other fun little future nuggets for you to look for. Like, I may be wrong, but I could have sworn there were at least two very fleeting moments when director Francis Lawrence inserted the fully rebuilt twin towers back into the New York City skyline. A nice touch, if I wasn’t hallucinating, but see if any of you can confirm that one for me and then don’t e-mail me at the address not listed in the non-existent tagline not at the bottom of this page to let me know if you saw it too. Now, before wrapping this up, I do need to mention a few things about the end of this movie which may contain spoilers, so either read on or skip over the next section accordingly.
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