Ravings for Remedies

Always research a movie coming from America, that is my personal motto now; it saves disappointment.

Last night we decided to waste our christmas movie voucher on ‘I am Legend’. The scope for a last man on earth scenario is huge and could’ve possibly involved a decent plot given the depth of expectation from the outset, but like many Hollywood ‘walletbusters’, there’s no punchline; just a continuing drone through confusion and gore. What was the point? It could’ve been something really exciting and worth talking about afterward. Instead we drove home feeling so incredibly ripped off, that Special K started crying and saying ‘that was so awful, I just wanted to leave before it finished.’

Lets break it down. From the first inkling of storyline we find Robert Neville, a megalomaniac dumbarse chasing deer around New York in (one minute part of the massive product placement) a GT500 Ford Mustang holding a sniper rifle trying to shoot through the scope while circumnavigating all the overgrown debris and abandoned cars. Wouldn’t it have been easier to get out and shoot one when not moving? The absurdity does not stop there. A lion attacks the deer he was ’stealthily’ hunting and rather then killing the lions and securing the deer, he lowers his rifle and leaves. What the hell? Oh but wait, it gets worse. While Samantha (a very attractive name for a dog), bolts into a dark enclosure in pursuit of a deer, the audience is lead by a trail of blood to believe some incredibly huge animal had taken it. That in itself would’ve been something. Though this may be classed as a spoiler (believe me, I’m doing you a favour), a darkened array of shadowy humanoid shapes all panting excessively like they were having a circle-jerk forced a statement from my mouth into the shocked audience ‘wtf?’

These dark-wankers are UV sensitive, so must stay in the shadows to survive. Why then do we find Neville rigging a trap under the shade of a bridge in which a female darkling runs out at the scent of blood and is snared by? If the shade was always there, why wasn’t Neville lynched? These creatures had ‘de-evolved’ by Neville’s scientific statement, yet were smart enough to rig up the same trap used on the ‘alpha female’ to snare Neville himself. Let’s face it, even without the strong 9/11 references to ‘ground-zero’ and the martyrdom of christianity, this movie is very holey. Poor script, planning, directing, very average CGI (nothing you haven’t seen before) and even more formulaic acting from the vessel of empty words, Will Smith. It seems there will only be one song on the soundtrack – Bob Marley’s ‘everything will be alright’, repeated twelve times to reinforce the fact that the movie has a major political agenda but is so poorly defined that you can almost hear the crickets after his sentence ‘bring light to darkness’. The audience didn’t exclaim anything like ‘wow!’ or ‘cool!’ (not like the commotion when seeing Transformers), there was nothing but silence. Maybe if Neville wasn’t trying to evoke laughter from the audience, it may have been a little more believable.

What else needs to be said except – AVOID!!!!