It had potential, but it never really came together.

Rating: 5/10 (20 December 2007)

I was very intrigued by the premise of I Am Legend. The tag line says it all, "The last man on earth is not alone." As the film begins, we find out that what started it was a cure for cancer. As the female new reporter asks the doctor, "So you've cured cancer?" and she responds, "Yes we have." One of the great things about the set up is that they actually tried to explain what went wrong in terms of the outbreak. They had found the cure for cancer which was a virus. The virus was created in a controlled fashion to attack and kill cancers rather than our normal bodily functions, and then something went wrong. People began dying en masse, and the rest were being mutated into zombies of some sort. But then we're introduced to Robert Neville (Will Smith), New York's only surviving human being. This was the real treat of the film for me. I'm not into the over the top action sequences with the pointless shoot outs and gratuitous violence, and I Am Legend does a great job of staying away from all of that. We see Robert Neville and his dog Sam walk around New York, looking for food, survivors, and it becomes clear that it's not always about their own survival; they look for anything that will get them through the day. I think Neville's boredom gets the best of him sometimes as he visits the video store and actually carries on conversations with the mannequins and what not.
The film does a great job of a balancing act; the story goes from the immediate effects of the outbreak to Robert Neville to his search for a cure and back again. The film didn't have that much dialogue rather, it focuses on the subtleties of a world wide outbreak and how it affects the last man alive.
One of the most unexpected turns in the film (and frankly, the most interesting and underutilized) was the role of the zombies. Dark seekers as they are called in the film, they were all once human beings that mutated into the monsters. As Neville documents in his charts (he has a lab in the basement where he's looking for a cure), he notes that the dark seekers slowly lose all signs of rational human behavior. But then something else happens. The dark seekers begin to take on the qualities of their own community. So three years after the outbreak, they being to slowly evolve. As Neville captures one of them to conduct experiments on, they set an identical trap for him. The writers and director could've explored this in more detail, as it was in the book, but then again, this is a Hollywood film and too much thinking would've taken away the mass appeal.
Sadly though, with all these great things, the film ends on such a weak note that you're left feeling like the makers rushed through the ending because they ran out of money. Overall the film had great potential, but it was ruined by an overly simplistic ending. Wait for the rental with this one.