Smith Saves Flawed Vision of Apocalypse

Rating: 7/10 (1 November 2008)

Everything bad about this movie almost spoils everything that is good about it  almost. Will Smith once again saves the day by making sure we're at home in his latest effects-driven picture and invested in its story instead of feeling like the 20 we dropped for tickets might have been better spent on a new shirt.
Playing Colonel and scientist Robert Neville, Smith nicely updates the last-man-on-earth concept with his trademark humor and humanity. Only Smith could get a laugh from an audience while we watch him patrol an eerily sad and decayed cityscape overgrown with encroaching foliage.
But Smith's world is more than just eerie. At night, other survivors of the air-born virus that wiped out 90 percent of the world's population come out to roam the streets and feed on any person or animal unfortunate enough to cross their paths. For these survivors, the virus has twisted them into bald, sinewy, vicious and oddly acrobatic "dark-seekers" who'd just as soon eat your head as look at you. Smith is among the tiny fraction who survived symptom-free due to a natural immunity. The dark-seekers seek the dark because the virus has also cursed them with an inability to withstand sunlight and their skin starts to sizzle and smoke in the faintest of light rays. Being Irish, this reviewer felt an uncomfortable fealty with these poor creatures on this point.
Accompanied by his faithful companion, Sam, a German Shepherd, Smith's Neville wiles the days away watching three-year-old tapes of the 'Today Show;' chipping golf balls off the wings of flightless fighter jets; chatting with mannequins, and hunting deer in Time Square  now overgrown with tall grass. But he also replays in dreams his family's doomed flight from Manhattan; seeks other survivors by way of a daily radio broadcast and experiments on captured dark-seekers in an attempt to find a cure for the virus.
The sight of Smith fishing in corporate coy ponds and cracking jokes with his dog keeps the haunting solitude from overwhelming the film but we wonder in a number of scenes if that's such a good thing. Giving us a little more time to ponder the concept may have helped its weight. The sun sets in the distance over tantalizingly vacant skyscrapers but we're invariably tied to whatever shoot'em up action Smith is coping with in the foreground.
But then the film grabs you by the heart-strings and shows you just how invested in the plight of Smith's 30-something boy-and-his dog story you've become. While it's got you, Smith's youthful next-generation movie-star humanity steps in and does that thing it always does in his effects-driven films: makes you take it all just seriously enough. He puts you squarely in his character's shoes and then makes you proud to be there. Only Smith can embrace pop-culture crappola in one breath and put a lump in your throat the next. His sentimental soliloquy about life and love in which the film's title is tied to a beloved Bob Marley album ( instead of the more obvious, somewhat prideful interpretation ) marks an effective emotional crux. This reviewer has never seen the 1971 'Omega Man,' adaptation, but I expect Charlton Heston's Neville was significantly less satisfying in this respect.
What drags this film down is the usual Hollywood smart-assery that inevitably infuses major releases like too much bad cologne: The dark-seekers can't just be a pack of lost souls with a heightened form, perhaps, of rabies. They've got to be computer-animated vampires with lightning-fast reflexes and super-human agility. A character cannot just meet another character in likely fashion but must be rescued in the nick of time from certain death. You can't have just a likable scientist at the center of your plot; he's also got to be a muscle-bound hipster with a wisecrack for every situation and a blast of machine-gun fire for anyone who ticks him off. In a key opening sequence we accompany Smith on safari in midtown Manhattan where a lion  yes, a lion -- ultimately takes down Smith's intended prey. Despite the faith moviegoers have lately placed in computer animation, this film's makers are definitely abusing the privilege. This scene's "lion" looked like a refugee from Pixar's cutting room floor  circa 1998. Same goes for the dark-seekers. If someone at Warner Brothers neglected to compare the cost of paying some animators for a few months of work versus paying an animal wrangler and a makeup artist for a few weeks of work, they should have thought twice about it.
Major, major kudos, however, to the set designers and everyone involved in making you believe you're looking at a New York three years after every person on Earth has perished. Grass growing in the middle of Broadway and brackish water filling underground parkways definitely set the mood.
In the end, though, it's Smith's depth and star-power that land this film safely in the winner's circle. From everyday exultation to heart-breaking loss and everything in between, it's the rare note that Smith misses.
Good for him and see this movie.
This movie review by Erik Gloor