I Am Legend (2007) DVD

      I purposely avoided seeing "I Am Legend" in the theaters because, while I'm usually pulled in by Will Smith's effortless charm and generally enjoy the movies I've seen him in, the original novella by Richard Matheson upon which the movie is loosely based was one of my earliest and favorite adolescent encounters with the horror genre. The landscape of movie adaptations is littered with the horribly mangled corpses of my favorite books. So when I finally gave in and rented the DVD, I fully expected to hand this review over to Smokey Burner at the Curmudgeon's Corner for a good old-fashioned rant. However, I'm forced to admit that although the movie not only ignores most of the original story, and in fact betrays its central premise (thus rendering the title meaningless), it doesn't really deserve the Full Smokey. Taken on its own, "I Am Legend" compares favorably to most of the monster movies that Hollywood currently produces, and if it had only followed through on a few promising moments, could actually have been pretty good.
      The movie opens with Robert Neville (Smith) as the last living human in New York and perhaps the world, having inexplicably survived a terrible virus (engineered as a cure for cancer) that has killed most of the population, and turned the survivors into ferocious, vampire-like zombies that come out at night to feed on...well, we're not really sure. Despite being an intelligent scientist, Neville employs what might be the least-likely-to-succeed method of deer hunting since the invention of the thrown rock--attempting to shoot them (and drive) as they run from his speeding sports car (try an upper-storey window, genius)--but the chase offers some cool establishing shots of a post-human New York City. With his faithful German Shepherd dog Sam, Neville spends his days collecting foodstuffs, working his way through the DVD's at the video store, and researching a cure for the zombie virus in his extremely well-set-up basement laboratory. He spends his nights behind shuttered windows, huddling with Sam in an empty bathtub until the zombies go back to bed.
      This all sounds pretty stupid, and I guess it is, but Smith manages to hold one's attention in his essentially solo performance, with a little help from Sam. And just when the viewer might be tiring of dealing only with them, two more survivors appear--a young Brazilian woman, Anna (Alice Braga) and the boy she cares for, Ethan (Charlie Tahan). Neville's shaky interactions with them--he's been alone with Sam for three years--create some of Smith's best scenes in the film. Unfortunately, their arrival marks the beginning of the end of the interesting portion of the movie, and the rest devolves into a standard-issue, jump-scare CGI fest, with ridiculously fast and powerful zombies serving only as bogeymen to drive the final action.
      It's too bad, because for a moment, following a scene where the zombies actually trick Neville into a life-threatening situation, I thought the movie was set to explore the latent humanity in the zombies, whom Neville has viewed to this point as mere beasts. Such an exploration would have led naturally back to the very themes that make the original book so interesting--when there's one (or three) of you and hundreds of thousands of them, maybe they're the future of the human race, not you. Sadly, pursuing those themes apparently would have required too much effort, either from the filmmakers or perhaps from the audience expected by the filmmakers. In any event, thanks to Smith, what we're left with makes for an entertaining-enough rental--especially if you've never read the book.

SPOILER ALERT AND WARNING: Animal lovers should know that there are a couple of very disturbing scenes involving Sam. While they're not at all exploitative, being central to the plot and very well-acted by Smith, anyone who is disturbed by bad things happening to animals should be prepared.