legend of creepy hollow
Your local movie critic has been vacationing and otherwise slacking off for a few weeks. He promises to be more dutiful as we approach awards season and the new year.
Let’s start with a heavily hyped Will Smith vehicle called “I Am Legend” (PG-13; 95 minutes)
Will Smith is a major star. He’s huge. He has to be to carry his latest movie — all but unassisted — on his impressively buffed-up shoulders.
Smith tries to accomplish what Tom Hanks did in “Cast Away,” except instead of being marooned on a tropical island, he’s stuck on the ultimate urban island, Manhattan. With only a German shepherd for companionship and a classy Mustang for transport, Smith’s character spends his days foraging and fretting over lost loved ones. The nights are when the story turns toward horror: That’s when vicious mutant zombies roam the otherwise empty streets.
“I Am Legend” is the third American feature based on Richard Matheson’s 1950s novel, but the first to wear its title. Neither Vincent Price (”The Last Man on Earth”) nor Charlton Heston (”The Omega Man”) has Smith’s charisma or energy in the role of a scientist who finds himself the apparent sole survivor of a nasty viral plague. The new film is the best of the lot for two reasons: Smith’s exhausting performance and the effects crew’s spectacular cityscapes.
Sure, the CGI creatures are gruesome fun, but we’ve seen that stuff before, most recently in “28 Days Later” and the latest “Dawn of the Dead” remakes and sequels. What knocked me out were the shots of familiar New York landmarks — particularly Times Square and Washington Square — overgrown with weeds and crumbling in disrepair.
But this is Smith’s show, and he never lets up. Whether brooding over mankind’s awful fate or springing into danger-defying action, he proves himself one of the few Hollywood luminaries who can sustain a stunted plot over a feature-length span.
Unfortunately, “I Am Legend” is so thin on story content that it seems longer than its actual 95 minutes. Director Francis Lawrence (”Constantine”) comes from the music-video universe, so the visual elements are pleasing enough even when nothing’s happening. But this story, with the original author’s social commentary pared down to minor inferences, belongs on, say, a single “Twilight Zone” TV episode.
Still, there are a couple of surprises worth awaiting — although I would not include the intellectually mushy finale among them.
Neither fully satisfying allegory nor crowd-pleasing horror thriller, “I Am Legend” will owe whatever success it has to Smith’s star power.
We give it a C+
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