Surprisingly good, albeit flawed, "Legend"

Rating: 7/10 (31 October 2008)

There is a certain majesty and genuine creepiness present in the early sequences of "I Am Legend," an apocalyptic sci-fi/horror, last-man-on-Earth featuring Will Smith as Robert Neville, our heroic Last Man on Earth. The film opens with Neville, accompanied by his German Shepherd Sam, driving a new Ford Mustang through the streets of a barren New York City chasing a herd of deer. Stalking one through Times Square, he's about to pull the trigger when he discovers that a lion is about to have a much better day.
And so begins "I Am Legend," an adaptation of the Richard Matheson novel, and had it come out in 2001 or 2002, it might fair better in the area of being a genuinely frightening sci-fi/horror flick. Other similarly themed movies have come out over the years, most notably "The Omega Man" (1971) and more recently "28 Days Later..." (2002), all of which have had varying degrees of success in adapting Matheson's work or taking the theme to a whole new dimension.
In "I Am Legend," the year is 2012, five years after a viral cure for cancer mutated into an even deadlier virus that turned much of the world's population into bloodthirsty vampires. As a result, the island of Manhattan was quarantined with all bridges leading onto it destroyed. He has the city all to himself during the day, feverishly working on a cure (to which he seems to have had some success at doing because he's somehow immune) but at night, it's time to batten down the hatches of his Central Park brownstone because at night, the city belongs to them - the "Darkseekers" (the plague-infected vampires) that own the night and the city when they come out to feed.
A wrinkle in the plot comes in the form of beautiful Anna (Alice Braga) and a young boy named Ethan (Charlie Tahan), who have somehow managed to survive through this thing, thus no longer making Neville the Last Man on Earth. She says that they're heading north because there is a rumored "sanctuary" somewhere in the mountains of Vermont, where the virus cannot survive due to the cold. Neville is skeptical, but Anna is absolutely positive because she believes that there is still a God up there.
The early scenes of the film featuring only Smith and his loyal canine companion Sam are the best sequences of the entire picture. I'm not sure how director Francis Lawrence achieved the effect of a deserted New York City but it is damn compelling. And we get to see fairly early who Neville's nocturnal adversaries are in one particularly suspenseful scene.
But one area that "I Am Legend" seems to suffer from is the Last Man on Earth Really Isn't the Last Man on Earth Syndrome. It's one of the things that has repeatedly killed these sorts of movies in the past. I seriously think the movie would have been better had it just been the "Will Smith Show Live & Uncut" for 100 minutes. And another area that really faults the movie is its climax, which is a sort of haunted-house routine that kind of ends anti-climatically and felt more than a little cheap. Of special effects, there is no shortage of them, even if these effects look a little unrealistic for today's highly sophisticated times.
While "I Am Legend" has plenty of faults, it is a chilling effective sci-fi/horror picture that does deliver in terms of shocks and special effects. I only hope the next Last Man on Earth is truly the Last Man on Earth.
7/10