I AM LEGEND
(Review)

Emma Thompson destroys the world.
I love it, I love it, I love it! She may have missed out on playing God in Kevin Smith’s Dogma, but boy, she can really bring down the house, can’t she?
In an all-too-brief (and uncredited) cameo, Thompson plays Dr. Alice Krippin, who, in engineering a viral cure for cancer, turns those poor souls unlucky enough not to be Will Smith, into hyper-active, sunlight-fearing CGI constructs.
All this Hollywood insanity can be found in Francis Lawrence’s big budget take on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (by way of the script for the 1971 Charlton Heston-starrer, The Omega Man).

For this latest re-do, megastar Smith is Robert Neville, the last uninfected man in New York. Roaming the overgrown, deserted streets by day with his trusty dog Sam—he’s completely immune to the Krippin Virus, while Sam, like all canines, is immune to the airborne strain—holed up in his nice, well-stocked (and fortified) digs by night, Neville continues to try to find a cure for the virus, some three years after the original outbreak.
Thus, for the most part, I Am Legend asks us to spend about an hour and a half watching Smith do his thing. Fortunately, Smith is an A-lister who can actually act, so that part of the equation is dandy.
Smith’s Neville is likeable enough, his rapport with Sam easy and amiable. Soon though, the cracks begin to show, as, realistically, given his situation, Neville really isn’t all there anymore. It’s interesting to watch him go from a subdued version of his usual Will Smith cinema persona, to a slightly crazed semi-loon complete with mini-meltdowns (the one involving Shrek is probably the most disturbing).
So, given that this is nearly a one-man show, Smith effectively carries his own weight. The script meanwhile—which is based on the ’71 adaptation—by Mark Protosevich (The Cell and the upcoming Thor) and Akiva Goldsman (who may have won an Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, but will always be remembered by yours truly as the man responsible for inflicting the script of Batman & Robin upon my delicate sensibilities), smoothly gives Smith leeway to play action hero, obsessed scientist, haunted father, and borderline nutcase, and the man doesn’t miss a beat.
But, like Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf, the problem isn’t so much in the script (though the third act developments may prove a tad too Hollywood for some) as it is in the pixels.

For some reason, director Lawrence chose to forego the use of human actors to play the KV-infected because he wasn’t quite getting what he was looking for in their performances. What that was, I’m not exactly sure: an air of gross artificiality?
The CGI bits are dodgy, and quite frankly, terribly distracting. As a result, you have a film that has some genuinely moving emotional scenes (notably, Neville’s regular midday idylls), but which falls hard and flat when it comes to the sequences that are supposed to be thrilling and tense.
Actually, the only effective thrill sequence comes when Sam inadvertently chases a deer into a dark, apparently abandoned building, and we catch our first glimpses of the infected. The build up, as Neville desperately tries to find the dog without waking the slumbering occupants, is taut, a well-constructed tension that snaps into so many brittle shards when the CGI monsters wake up and give chase.
The things look patently fake, so, knowing that Smith is out there running from and struggling with a bunch of pixels kind of bursts the bubble, you know? (The fact that Dash Mihok—who recently appeared in Pushing Daisies’ “Pigeon” episode—gets third billing as the “Alpha Male,” is truly odd, considering he’s not recognizable beneath the computer-generated, mo-cap sheen, and the performance doesn’t strike me as one that reaches an Andy Serkis-level.)

It’s sad since I Am Legend could have been a legitimate Hollywood portrait of a viral apocalypse, instead of the hobbled, compromised creature that it is.
Anyone looking for white-knuckle, viral apocalypse thrills would do well to look towards the 28 Days/Weeks Later area of zombie cinema. I Am Legend, while certainly better than Lawrence’s previous effort, the lamentable Constantine, may have a beating heart, but it clearly lacks any real, organic teeth to make it a formidable and threatening cinematic construct.*

* Of course, given that I Am Legend has made, at the time of this review’s writing, a staggering US total of $228 million in just 4 weeks of release (that puts it at # 6 on the US Top Ten Films released in 2007, having just edged out The Bourne Ultimatum by a measly million; it’s also raking in the moolah across the globe—as of January 1, it already had a cumulative gross of $126 million, from 25 markets), shows that the film has found an audience, so what do I know?

Parting shot: Reviews of 28 Weeks Later, Beowulf, and Constantine, as well as episodic recaps of Pushing Daisies, can be found in the Archive.

(I Am Legend OS courtesy of wildaboutmovies.com.)

reVIEW (21)
CONSTANTINE

Don’t believe the travel brochures.
Hell’s a great place to visit. Really. And you don’t even need a visa, just a container of water and a cat in your lap.
Just take a look at Constantine, a film which kicks off (after some short preliminaries) with an exorcism in a Filipino community in L.A., a sequence designed to firmly establish that this is NOT your father’s Exorcist. No creaky old Max Von Sydow chanting “The power of Christ compels you…” here; in this movie, all you need to smite some demon butt is a mirror and Keanu Reeves.

Based on Hellblazer, the DC comic from its Vertigo line of titles (non-superhero, and geared to a more mature audience), Constantine pretty much captures a certain aspect of the comic: the backstreet, DIY nature of John Constantine’s brand of magic—no chanting, no rituals, and no explanations. Stick your feet (still in their shoes, mind you) in a container of water, and presto, you get to visit Hell. Why? Because it works that way.
Now, in the comic, these little tricks fly because the writers and artists are able to create a world where stuff like this actually makes some strange sort of sense, a world where the bizarre belongs. A world with atmosphere.
Tragically, Francis Lawrence, who directed Constantine, is the kind of music video director who thinks atmosphere is something you see, rather than feel, the kind of music video director who seems to be after the pretty shot, and not much else.*

Take the film’s Hell. It’s got that post-apocalyptic L.A. After the Bomb look, with lots of open-headed CGI nasties scrambling about, but it doesn’t really convey a true sense of the Kingdom of Pain, no brimstone whiff of genuine Hellishness. The Mongolian hordes on a Sunday at Megamall are far more vicious and intimidating. Now that’s what I call “Hell.”
And, granted, the film does have its moments (Constantine battling demon half-breeds in a rain of holy water; the divine Tilda Swinton’s Gabriel getting down to business; Shia LaBeouf‘s Chas, in his final, post-end credits shot), but they’re too few, and too far between, to make any real sort of impact on the whole; a whole that ends up being a badly-paced, plodding affair, with a plot of the connect-the-dots school: bump off minor characters A and B to get major characters C and D to points E and F.

Now, though I’m dead certain there’ll be Hellblazer fans out there who’ll belabor the point that this is not the John Constantine of the comic book, that, Heavens to Murgatroid, Constantine isn’t even American, personally, I think the real problem is more that Constantine wasn’t just turned into any old Yank, he was turned into… duuude… Keanu!
Though I’ve managed to enjoy some films despite his presence (The Matrix, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Dangerous Liaisons), Reeves simply doesn’t have either the acting chops or the gravitas to pull off the complexity of John Constantine, the likeable rogue, the anti-hero scoundrel haunted by far too many ghosts, playing both sides off against the middle, trying to buy his way into Heaven while struggling to keep just one step ahead of the Reaper. None of that is in evidence here. Instead, all he does is smoke, add a husky register to his voice, and look testy and vaguely constipated.

And though Rachel Weisz (of The Mummy films) tries gamely to give dimension to her conflicted Catholic cop Angela Dodson, she suffers, acting opposite the likes of Reeves. Performance-wise, the high points of Constantine are Tilda Swinton (Young Adam, The Deep End), whose androgynous beauty is perfect for Gabriel, and Pruitt Taylor Vince (Identity, S1m0ne) as Father Hennessy.
The rest of the cast are sabotaged, either by a script that leaves their characters underdeveloped and unexplored (like LaBeouf‘s Chas, who comes off as too much the loyal, eager puppy ready to learn), or because they’re forced to act alongside you-know-who.
Then of course, there’s Gavin Rossdale. Casting Bush’s front man as demon half-breed Balthazar might have been a good idea, if Rossdale could actually carry a scene, but there’s just too much of the preening rock star in him; he’s not acting, he’s performing. The confrontation between Constantine and Balthazar towards film’s end is a bizarre moment where the audience is watching the collision of a quasar and a black hole. I have no idea what that is in astronomical terms, but it’s something I don’t care to see again.
And please, don’t get me started on Peter (Spun, Fargo) Stormare’s Devil.

In the end, Constantine isn’t a complete loss. Like I said, it has its moments, and you do get to visit Hell without all the unpleasantness advertised in the brochures.
Just don’t expect too much, and Heavens to Murgatroid, don’t expect Hellblazer.
Do that, and you may actually not regret having seen the film.

* Please don’t think I’m being a snob here. There are video directors out there who understand atmosphere: David Fincher (Fight Club), Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich), Mark Romanek (One Hour Photo), Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). Lawrence, though…

(Constantine OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

(The above is a slightly altered version of a previously published review entitled “To Hell and Back.”)