Shame on the neocon evangelical marketing weenies who made this.

Rating: 2/10 (29 January 2008)

The name "Will Smith" on a movie marquee now means to me, "give me my money back, if you're gonna make me watch your commercials, dammit!" This film starts with a fairly good premise-- that a cancer cure causes massive deaths, leaving some uninfected people alive but torturously alone. After that, it rapidly sinks into insulting the audience and waving its dumb neo-conservative, pro-military, two-dimensional, evangelical Christian message at us until we want to beat the producers to death with broken glass and wooden furniture.
Will Smith starts out by trying to sell the audience a sports car, with needless closeups of its logo. Man, didn't I already PAY for this film at the DAMNED DOOR??? Gimme my money back! Then there's the needless ego-stroking: Will Smith is a "hero" on Time Magazine's cover... for what? He's a military medical man, not the (Emma Thompson) character who invented this cure for cancer. In fact, it turns out that he's widely known as the person who released the malignant version of this retro-virus... yet no characters blame him or wish him ill.
The sheer coincidence that he's a) famous, b) the guy who released the retro-virus into New York City's general population, c) immune, and d) working on a cure...just kills the believability of the film at the start.
The CGI effects of the abandoned city are effective, but the monsters are... pathetic. The overstretched mouth during a scream is a tired re-do of the Mummy's scream in the Brendan Frasier film "Hamunaptra". The fact that the monsters don't starve and don't freeze to death in winter is pure silliness. The sheer energy and superhuman strength of the monsters is a believability-killer for anyone over the age of 5.
Worst, the film becomes offensive and moronic in its pushiness about Christianity, pro-military stance, and flag-waving. By the time we're shown a town of survivors in Small Town America, with high walls, a big church, and an American flag in front of EVERY home, the audience was either actively booing or looking like they were sitting through unanaesthetized dental work.
Shame. On. These. Movie makers.