Not awful, but not great

Rating: 6/10 (16 February 2008)

Sitting down in the theater to watch what is basically another zombie-movie didn't feel all that appealing. But "I Am Legend" seemed to have a few things going for it. Like a being based on an actual novel, like having nice cinematography and a style that seemed appealing. In the end though, i found that this movie had serious trouble rising above mediocrity.
We can start with the good. This movie has a few things really going for it. It looks gorgeous to begin with. The empty and partly overgrown streets of New York are awesome. The visual style is generally very nice and atmospheric. Second the music is great. Both the score and the very well-picked songs add to the mood of the movie. The third thing i liked was actually Will Smith. I'm not one of his biggest fans, although i do think he has some talent, not least in comedy roles. Here though he carries the first half of the movie quite admirably. After that, the whole thing degenerates in a way that not even the best actor could save.
The actually brings me to the bad points. In general, people have been saying that the first two thirds of the movie were great, the last third awful. In most parts i can agree, although i would say that the first two thirds were good, and the ending disappointing. Honestly i can't say that this would have become a favorite of mine even with a good ending. But the ending they chose for this movie must have been one of the worst choices they could have. Since they didn't seem to follow the book that closely, they could easily have remodeled the ending to something a lot better. One of the other things that bothered me were the zombies (or "Dark Seekers" as they call them) themselves. They are a mess of decent quality CGI that somehow turns quite awful in a few scenes. This is not the first time that movies have shown fluctuating quality in it's CGI, but i'm wondering where it comes from. If you have a big budget it shouldn't be that difficult to make the quality decent through the whole movie.
In the end this movie didn't really appeal to me that much. It wasn't awful, but it wasn't great either. I almost always have a problem with movies that are basically one-man shows. I loathed "Cast Away" for instance due to the fact that Hanks is far from good enough to carry a whole movie. It worked better in this movie due to the fact that Will Smith had more things to interact with, but it's still a problem. Also the whole "zombie-virus" thing feels explored already. We have 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later which are both better movies on basically the same theme. I think it's time that Hollywood left the zombie-theme alone for a while and started on something else. This is getting repetitive.