I am legend review

I am legend is the third and most recent adaptation of the novel with the same name. Will Smith plays the lead here and this is in my opinion the movie that comes closest to being good. Again the main story is basically the same, but instead of a random epidemic or biological warfare the cause of the mutation eradicating mankind is a flawed cancer vaccine.

The city is excellently portrayed as abandoned, eerie and overgrown. Smith’s character, military scientist colonel Neville, is the only human left. His only company is the dog Samantha and various mannequins which he has placed in key areas of town that he frequently visits to have someone to talk to. I think that the character is also a lot better portrayed as haunted and tormented by the situation than in any of the two previous movies. He does not actively seek out the mutants to aimlessly kill them, nor do they know where he lives  as he makes sure to lock himself up all quiet with lights out during nights when the mutants come out to roam the streets.

It all looks and feels great and perfect atmosphere. Of course not even this movie is without flaws. With just a few quick glimpses of the mutants during the first 50 minutes of the movies running time you can see they don’t really look all that good, but it still works OK. However halfway into the movie when the mutants start to be a lot more active and linger on camera you realize they look like crap. Really bad CGI and their leader looks and howls a lot like Imhotep from the Mummy movies…

The movie is good up until Neville loses his dog and meets up with other humans who you can’t really relate to or care about. At this point the plot rapidly degenerates and culminates in another really bad ending. The ending in Last man on earth was bad because it felt rushed and thrown together, the ending in the Omega man was plain stupid. The ending in I am legend is really irritating because it is so obvious that it could have ended so much better for the main character but it's set up to become this unexplainable stupid decision. The ending actually doesn’t make any sense at all.

But the worst part were the ugly CGI mutants, compared to them at least the vampire/zombies from Last man on earth had a “Night of the living dead” low budget charm to them.
It really annoys me the way these movies turned out. Each had a very good concept and tried different approaches, but they pretty much turned out to be halfassed attempts all of them. This last one I think came the closest to actually be a good movie - and it pretty much is if you stop watching at the 50 minute mark. The rest sucks badly.

5.5/10