Grrr, arrrgh

Rating: 4/10 (23 November 2008)

The company that made the TV series Buffy was named Mutant Enemy, and its logo showed a cartoon cut-out of a bald monster with outstretched arms bobbing through the frame while an offscreen voice says, "Grrr, arrrgh." That's more or less what the monsters in this movie amount to.
And facing off against them is another TV cartoon, Fresh Prince: no longer so fresh, but exuding the same air of affable cheekiness, now ambling through the apocalypse with only his trusty dog as companion. (Note to screenwriters: As a device for allowing a character to confide his thoughts, a dog is just one step up from a sock puppet.) This is the third movie of Richard Matheson's book. It must be much the most expensive (the star's salary probably exceeds the budgets of the other two movies combined), and much the best-looking. It's also much the worst, because it leaves out the reason for the story. The story is a suspense story; the movie leaves out the suspense.
The book was based on one simple idea: the last surviving human shares a ruined city with a band of vampires; during the day he hunts them, and at night they hunt him. Every sunset is a source of dread; every sunrise is a relief. You feel the suspense of the situation just hearing about it. The first two movies got that. I would have imagined it impossible to make a movie of the book and not get that. Yet here's one that manages not to.
It opens well, at first sight. It begins with a TV interview of a great biologist and humanitarian (well played by Emma Thompson), discoverer of the miracle cure that will save us all. Cut from her glowing optimism to the desolate streets that were her ultimate legacy.
And amid the desolation, who do we find? No legend (except of the box-office kind): big Hollywood star Fresh Prince-Bagger Vance-Hitch, former rag doll now become bendable action figure, as likable and unreal as ever. He's like a big kid, and the director is clearly a kid at heart, so that between them they vividly transmit how it would feel to have a great golden-hued city all to yourself (or nearly): like having the world as your playground.
These opening scenes are great to watch.
The trouble is, they're all wrong for this movie.
The interview that shows the seed of the crisis would have been a good start for a science fiction story like Day of the Triffids (the TV serial of which actually had an equivalent scene); it does nothing toward introducing a horror story about a man playing cat-and-mouse with vampires--or, as here, mutants.
And then, the opening scene shouldn't be sketching out a character who isn't part of the story but the character who is, the one we should care about.
And then, the city shouldn't seem like a theme park but a real place, with real menace in its streets.
And then, those opening scenes shouldn't exist simply for their own sake but should be unobtrusively laying the groundwork for what is to come, so that it appears to happen of its own accord.
The movie gives no sense of scope. No sense of the passage of time; of the contrast between what was and what is; of the devolution of humankind. It doesn't even give a sense of the points of the first interest in any story about a lone survivor: how does he survive? how does he stay sane? what is life like for him day by day? Again, the first two movies got that. Although both were poorly staged, they were right in essence: stark, grim, and slightly seedy. And their leading actors were well chosen. Vincent Price shared in the seediness himself, Charlton Heston acted like a cop on a beat who was used to it. A certain distaste for the people (or other species) around them, which is almost an essential for this story, fell squarely in the middle of the actors' ranges. Not so Smith's. He's still the Magical ******, stepping in at the moment of crisis to disclose the authentic swing. He even manages it here, so that the title, which served as punchline and climax in the book, doesn't even apply.
In the first movie the vampires were more like zombies (probably the models for George Romero's in Night of the Living Dead), in the second they were changed into a mutant cult that seemed rather silly, but even then they made up a unified force and had a certain stature to them. In this movie they're just Mutant Enemies; they might as well be baboons. The movie is set up like a video game. The director keeps it from looking like one, and that's to his credit, but the flamboyance of his imagination turns it into a French comic book instead. He probably doesn't do seedy.
--which means, more or less, that he doesn't do suspense.