Close, but no cigar

Rating: 4/10 (23 January 2008)

For a movie that was 1hr & 41 minutes long the setup, though great, took too long, causing the confrontation and climax to happen too late in the film, which led to a flat Deus ex Machina kind of ending.
The sacrifice of the hero at the end held no gravity for the "damsel in distress" (i.e. the survivor woman and her son) because their emotional relationship with the hero, Will Smith, had no time to develop and mature, which is why the climax and ending felt flat and empty. The damsel element was added to late in the film. The capturing of the zombie female was the right time for the female element to be introduced into the movie, like the original novel ("I am Legend") and the two previous adapted movies had done, instead of splitting in two the damsel element into the female zombie and the female survivor characters that this recent interpretation of a great story has done.
Sometimes you wonder if these production companies think too much when working on their scripts.
The relationship between Will Smith and his dog was more powerful than the one between him and the human females. Maybe they should have cut out the human females and just focused on the bitch.