I Am Disappointing

Rating: 6/10 (6 January 2008)

Being one of the final block buster films of 2007, "I Am Legend" has still managed to gross a whopping buck in the final week of the UK box office than the majority of films have done in a month. Still, with this in mind, the film was set to be huge, and give 2007 a good seeing off. Quite frankly, the best film I've seen this year, still has to be "Hot Fuzz", I couldn't compare Legend to Fuzz in any respect.
Legend tries to deliver what the Omega Man back in the 70's tried to deliver, isolation, paranoia and one mans fight for survival. In its best attempt, Legend does touch the top of tip of the ice berg on all of these attributes, it just doesn't really succeed in making you believe, even if Will Smith does give a pretty decent performance.
The film is basically about one person creating a cure for cancer, in which they reverse the string of the cancer disease, and thus, reversing the patients cancer string to cure them. We then get thrown into the mix 3 years down the line, to a desolate New York city, with no one but Smith and his Dog. Throughout the film, we get flashbacks of what happens to New York in its final hours before everything falls to pieces, and the supposed cure for cancer, fluctuates and reverses into a viral outbreak (Resident Evil anyone?) that turns everyone into zombie nocturnal like creatures that cannot get into direct contact with sunlight. This is pretty much what the flashbacks deliver, and do not really give us an insight of a deeper storyline and background to the film.
The film just doesn't seem to flow at all. Its story is limited and flawed in every way. You don't find out how the virus spread, why only a small minority of the population don't get infected, and how the virus originated. Its then just plot hole bonanza in that aspect, but we are left to figure out the story by ourselves, and thats annoying.
Albeit there isn't a lot of talking in the movie, Smith does do a fairly decent job of being the "only survivor" in NYC, but he does seem to drift off and give us some pretty bad acting in other scenes. But compare it to Tom Hanks in Castaway, and how he builds a relationship with the football "Wilson", I felt so much more upset when that ball got swept out to sea, than when Smith loses the things closest to him in this movie. You'll see what I mean.
Above all else, this film is short. And that sucks. This film truly is a disappointment. Its decent at best don't get me wrong, but I just felt it was rushed, the ending was shockingly presented and it just didn't leave me pleased when it finished.
Some of the scenes were quite groovy, almost Doom like - but with less cheese factor. But then after the red mist has settled, its just another disappointment for a supposed blockbuster of a movie. I just hope we can actually get a decent survival-horror-apocolyptical movie in the coming years.