Watchable, but nothing special.

Rating: 1/10 (24 October 2008)

Richard Matheson's 1954 novel 'I Am Legend' has once again been made into a major motion picture. Over fifty years and two previous film adaptations later, 'I Am Legend' is being presented to a whole new generation of science-fiction fans. The latest edition of 'I Am Legend' sees 'Constantine' director, Francis Lawrence, take to the helm, with Oscar nominated actor Will Smith playing the lead.
The year is 2012 and the usually busy and 'never sleeping' Manhattan is eerily silent and decadent. For three years, the earth has been plagued by a man-made highly contagious virus which was originally created to cure cancer but is now the reason for the rapidly approaching demise of the human race. Smith's character, Robert Neville, is seemingly the sole survivor who single-handedly tries to find a cure that will ward off the apocalypse. As if this wasn't hard enough, venturing into the city can only be done during daylight hours, as when the sun sets is when things get sinister. Under the cover of darkness, 'The Infected' roam Manhattan, frantically searching for any trace of uninfected inhabitants.
Though it shares many similarities to the book there are also many differences, such as the location: sunny Los Angeles was changed to New York as the writer said the city was 'never empty', therefore making the content seem even more eerie. Perhaps the most recent film you could compare it to is Danny Boyle's British horror, '28 Days Later', where the main character awakes from a coma to find a usually abundant and loud city deserted and silent. Smith's character does have one advantage though; he knows exactly what has happened.
The main character is military scientist Robert Neville who, for three years, has been trying to save the world with his trusty canine companion, Samantha. Every day Neville sends out radio transmissions, under the call sign 'Legend', calling out for any survivors of the virus stating that he has shelter and food. A reply is never received. For a man who has seen his wife and child die in the very evacuation attempt that was meant to save them, he is surprisingly strong, both emotionally and physically. Maybe it is his sheer determination, or perhaps not knowing what else to do that keeps him fighting for his life and the freedom of the world. That is until The Infected set a trap for Neville involving one of the many mannequins that line the Manhattan shops. As a result of this Sam is attacked by a pack of infected dogs. While he escapes unscathed, Sam succumbs to the virus and it becomes a case of 'kill or be killed' for him.
Perhaps it was inevitable that once Sam died that Neville would want to follow. Maybe it was because she was the last living thing he had contact with or the fact that she was the last connection between his wife and daughter. Whatever it is, he is now on a mission to destroy himself.
As always, Will Smith fits into and plays the role of 'I'm a just a guy trying to save the world' as well as he did in his previous films: Independence Day and Men In Black. Smith can always give a good performance even if the film is terribly dire. You would think that with so few characters in the movie that the casting crew would be able to find perfect actors for the ones there are, right? Wrong. Alice Braga, whose character Anna turned up at last minute with her son, performed rather poorly and made it seem as if she was just there to offer a quick ending to the story. Her son served only as a 'filler' role for the sympathy vote and to add the similarity between Neville's dead wife and daughter, making Anna's son a daughter would have only made this even more obvious than it already was.
Overall, the film did as well as the script allowed. Minor changes were permitted to the film that maybe shouldn't have been, such as the female characters' name from Ruth to Anna, or maybe Anna is a completely new uninfected character with a son thrown in for good mix while Ruth was cut from the film. The ending also seemed rather weak, exploring the theme of theology by making Neville seem Christ-like in sacrificing himself to save the rest of humanity. To me this seemed rather illogical; surely all of The Infected in Manhattan couldn't have been in Neville's lab or within a blast radius. Potentially, it could have been great, but ended up becoming just another apocalypse movie with zombie types thrown in.