* * SPOILERS FOR I AM LEGEND * *
I Am Legend is one of my favorite books. It’s a compact, harrowing vision of utter loneliness in a hostile world (something author Matheson also captured brilliantly in his novel The Shrinking Man), and its conclusion is memorable and thought-provoking. I had basically given up all hope of the movie being anything other than mindless entertainment when I heard that Akiva Goldsman (who is mediocrity made flesh, and who previously travestized another old favorite of mine, Asimov’s I, Robot) was involved. I was still hoping the movie would at least be entertaining, and it is for about two-thirds of its running time, carried by terrific performances by Will Smith and his dog. (The dog is genuinely talented; I wish the dog had written the screenplay.) Unfortunately, the final act is filmmaking that’s as bad as any I’ve ever been subjected to. Not only is absolutely everything about the final half hour of the movie absurd, incompetent, and feebleminded, but, as was exactly the case with the I, Robot adaptation, the movie replaces the thought-provoking theme of the book with a cliche theme that makes exactly the opposite point as the book, and that is exactly the sort of reflexive witlessness that the book was written to critique in the first place. I also may have a new candidate for stupidest movie line of all time (replacing Starship Troopers‘ “I don’t mind that I was eviscerated by a giant beetle because at least I got to have sex with you first” — that’s a paraphrase), which is when the miraculous and ludicrous female survivor tells Will Smith, “I know there’s a colony of survivors living in the mountains of Vermont. How? God told me.” She quickly adds, “I know how that sounds,” to which I was unable to restrain myself from remarking aloud, “Yeah, like bad writing.” The last act of the movie is so nauseatingly terrible that it casts a cloud over the whole thing, unfortunately. The first two thirds are rather enjoyable, so if you see this movie I urge you in the strongest possible terms to leave the theater/kill your DVD player as soon as Will Smith drives to the pier at night. It’s at that point that the movie suffers the most precipitous decline in quality of any movie I can think of.
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