I Am Legend Review

Something like eighty percent of all movies these days are adaptations of books, or remakes of older films. (Granted I just made that number up, but it sounds about right). And there are even some films, like last month's I Am Legend, that are some sort of bastard child of adaptations and remakes- they're caught in a middle ground of rehashing the source, and rehashing changes to that source made so many times that the respect for the original story is lost.

Francis Lawrence, late of the decent but horribly disrespectful to its source material Constantine (and Britney Spears' "I'm A Slave 4 U" video!), helms this film, which owes its premise and title to a revered Richard Matheson novel, but everything else to countless other adaptations of that novel, most notably the Charlton Heston vehicle The Omega Man.

The idea is that a cure for cancer, synthesized from the mumps virus, goes horribly awry and has left most of humanity dead, and the rest of them vampiric zombie-ish monsters- except for curiously immune Robert Neville (Will Smith), the only survivor in New York.

The first hour plus of the film is actually hauntingly austere, as Smith hunts food among the barren New York cityscape, and has a few misadventures in dark corners along with his trusty dog, Samantha (some dog). The friendship between man and animal recalls one of the most touching passages from Matheson's book, though it is a much more extended relationship here.

And while I was perfectly prepared for the film to be drastically different than the book, and I'm well aware that films taken loosely from the premise of a novel can even be pretty awesome (like last year's Children of Men, or pretty much anything Hitchcock ever did), there's a particular darkness and melancholy that a vampire story needs, which Matheson ultimately revels in, and the film sharply diverts from in a hasty, fairy-tale like conclusion.

It's disappointing, really, because Smith does too well in the film's first half to have the ending be such a cop-out. And the most odd part is that the title, which this film version became the first to retain, "I Am Legend," is based on a very specific, grim revelation near the end of the book, and since I Am Legend has no such ending, it's pretty much just clunkily applied in voice-over to Will Smith being the legendary type, as he usually is in adventure movies.

So if I hadn't read the novel? It's still an okay film, a very entertaining, ultimately very Will Smith film, but it's hard to see it as anything more than a missed chance for a winner.

When to See It: On DVD

Leftover thoughts:

• My girlfriends biggest pet peeve: the "vampires" were really just mediocre CGI monsters that hardly looked real, with none of the menace of your traditional vampiria (you know, ones that look like real people, which requires no CGI at all).
• The best addition of the filmmakers to the story was Smith setting up mannequins to talk to around the city, in an obviously flailing attempt to keep himself sane.
• Can't Will Smith play something other than a generic good guy, for once? Does he not remember making Six Degrees of Seperation (where he plays a con artist)? Come on. Also, can he and his people stop taking classic works of last century's science fiction and draining them of any moral ambiguity and depth?
• The German Shepherd was a fun sidekick for the last man on earth, but I'll always have a special place in my heart for Wilson the volleyball from Castaway.