Cinema review
Directed by Francis Lawrence
Starring Will Smith, Alice Braga, Charlie Tahan
Release date 26 December 2007 (UK)

After an outbreak of a mysterious plague, scientist Robert Neville (Will Smith) finds he is the last man left alive in a city of flesh-eating monsters…

Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend is one of the true greats of science fiction/horror literature. The story of one man languishing in alcoholic anguish as he adapts to life surrounded by blood-craving vampires, the book is compact, paranoid, downbeat and entirely gripping. Francis Lawrence’s 2007 movie I Am Legend is a slick, big budget, fairly dumb vehicle for Will Smith. The two share the same title and lead character name, but have precious little else in common, despite the claims by Constantine director Lawrence that his movie is faithful to the spirit of Matheson. Even the title takes on an entirely new meaning here.

In place of an everyman driven to drink and despair by the loss of his happy family life, we get a clean-cut Will Smith working out and parading around town with a giant machine gun. Smith has proven he can pull off serious roles, with excellent turns in Six Degrees of Separation and Ali. Here, though, he feels out of place. While he reins in the wisecracks and winning grins, the actor just looks too scrubbed-up and stylish to really convince us he’s the last man left alive. Never once do you believe that this is somebody wreaked by fear, paranoia and despair, even with the gratuitous flashback to Neville’s wife and child.

Smith isn’t helped by Lawrence’s failure to establish any real sense of one man left alone in a big city. Sure, you get plenty of sweeping shots of downtown New York and Neville sauntering along deserted boulevards. But these scenes seem purely designed to show off how much money was spent on the film, and it ends up destroying any feeling of isolation and loneliness. Compare this to the recent 28 Weeks Later (a film this sometimes resembles), and the smart, unforced way that movie wove London landmarks into its story.

And that's the main gripe with I Am Legend - it's twice the budget it needs to be, and the film’s power is lessened by a wave of expensive special effects. There's one brilliantly tense scene where Neville wanders through a dank apartment block searching for his runaway dog; the flashlight cuts through the gloom, his eyes dart around with unease, until he stumbles upon a group of figures huddled in the corner...they turn - and we find that they're hopelessly unconvincing CGI monsters with superhuman strength and agility! It’s difficult to believe that these creatures are mutated humans, and the fact that they look like they’ve escaped from a computer game renders them less-than-terrifying whenever we see them up close. Worse still is the decision to cart on obviously-CGI deer and lions in an early scene. These are REAL ANIMALS! Why on Earth do they need to be recreated on computers?

I Am Legend is an efficient enough movie on its own terms, and there are a scattering of expertly constructed set-pieces. But it's far from the intelligent genre movie its creators would have us believe. At times it assumes its audience is just as dumb. Are we really asked to believe that a woman in her late 20s has never heard of Bob Marley (but is familiar with his son Damian)? This is the third and weakest adaptation of I Am Legend after 1964’s The Last Man on Earth and 1971’s The Omega Man. We still await the definite adaptation of Matheson's novel. Matt McAllister

VERDICT: 5/10
A dumb, if unusually downbeat, monster movie masquerading as serious sci-fi. Still, it’s not the end of the world!

Click here for an interview with Will Smith.