Review: I Am Legend

* 1/2

Will Smith, Alice Braga, Dash Mihok, Sally Richardson-Whitfield, Charlie Tahan. Directed by Francis Lawrence. Screenplay by Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by Richard Matheson. Rated PG-13. 100 minutes. Warner Brothers.

The general consensus among many of my peers is that I Am Legend, the new film version of Richard Matheson’s famous short novel about a near-future virus that has marked the human race for extinction, is a pretty decent sci-fi ride with some way cool shots of an abandoned New York, some awesome CGI deer running amok through a weed-infested Times Square and a "powerful" performance by Will Smith—you heard that right—battling, yet again, a bunch of computerized creepies hurled at him for a couple diverting hours.

Don’t you believe them.

This overblown, plodding and "bleak" vision of a near-future ravaged by disease, and the last man standing—a family lovin’ scientist, doctor and apparent bodybuilder, fending off carnivorous zombies while stacked with a fast car, heavy artillery, a loyal pooch and a cupboard full of non-perishables—is dead on arrival.

Immune, brilliant scientist Dr. Robert Neville (Will Smith) is left alone in Manhattan after a deadly, man-made virus intended to cure cancer has taken the lives of everyone else on Earth. The film’s intriguing set-up features a number of fun how’d-they-do-that shots of solitude in the world’s busiest city, now sitting quietly in decay. There’s an undeniable kick to seeing New York City deadly still, hushed, frozen in time.

But it turns out that many of the afflicted still "live" in a mutated state of physically overpowering cannibalism, hiding in the dark until the sun goes down, forcing Neville into a locked-down townhouse complete with an elaborate basement laboratory where he experiments on infected animals and a restrained, diseased zombie. He has apparently figured out how to reduce the virus in the blood, potentially reversing the disease and curing the epidemic.

Initially, the film is deceptively quiet and Smith carries the burden of moving through scenes without other actors, reacting, hunting, talking to himself, mannequins or his faithful dog, watching old video footage of Today with a Time magazine cover story heralding his genius permanently affixed to the fridge. One unfortunate excursion into the alerts the scavenging marauders to his existence. He later discovers another survivor (Alice Braga) en route to a potential survivor’s colony Neville believes to be a fiction. And that’s about it.

All of this would be fine if the film bothered to thrill in any way other than the initial awe of the empty metropolis or a random shock cut every ten minutes or so. But the big reveals—the rabies-stricken, computer-enhanced zombies—quickly become a bore, hurled over and over at the camera with herky-jerky movements more at home on a PS3 than in a scene with live actors.

Smith, the bankable star with the affable style, seems out of place as a scientist or a doctor, reciting medical mumbo-jumbo with faux authority and showing off his pumped up physique in scene after endless scene of shirtless pull-ups or tight tees. Enough already. By the second half of I Am Legend, he’s up to his old verbal goofing off, reciting Shrek in a painfully long diatribe and riffing on Bob Marley with tired, out of place Men in Black silliness, upping The Will Smith Coolness Factor he lazily trades on whenever he feels like coasting.

And then there’s his painfully forced emoting at the death of his family, the death of his dog, the death of his mannequin friends, ad nauseum, which plays like the actor believes I Am Legend is Ibsen, or at least The Pursuit of Happyness, which featured as subtle and affecting a dramatic performance from Smith as he is over the top here. What a difference a year—and a good script—makes.

Similar narrative ground was covered with considerably more thought in this year’s 28 Weeks Later (as well as its predecessor, 28 Days Later), a killer thriller about a ferociously deadly "rage" virus that has wiped out the world and left London in quarantine.

That film, with its eerie, shell shocked city devastated by an apocalyptic modern blitz, contains many identical elements as I Am Legend (which was written prior): the virus, the epidemic, the ragtag survivors, the immune few and the ferocious, maniacal infected, played by actors—how novel—not pixels. It also had the guts to parlay its crisis into a provocative discussion about wartime military ethical conundrums on the order of extermination. It is a film full of ideas and fear, and where I Am Legend is content to peddle endless shots of abandoned Times Square and boring CGI demons wallpapering a grating star turn, 28 Weeks Later is the real deal, terrifying as both a plausible science fiction nightmare and pointed military indictment.

There’s nothing even memorable here, let alone legendary.

- Lee Shoquist