I Am Legend

Directed by
Francis Lawrence

Having a one-man show and a big budget action movie at the same time is impossible. Yeah, I know that you can do just about anything nowadays, but that is one of them you can't do successfully. This film isn't technically a one-man show, so it doesn't count. There are indeed other characters here, but for the most part they're just cameos. This is about as close to being a solo act that one can have under the circumstances.

Starting with an interview with a famous biologist(Emma Thompson) explaining her new wonder cure for cancer on Faux News, we then cut to three years later to see the results. Robert Neville (Will Smith) is the last person in Manhattan who isn't a zombie. He and his dog Sam go around the city hunting deer and looking for other people.

For 80% of the film, this is all Will Smith all the time. Okay, him and the dog, but that's it. He talks to himself, to the dog, to manikins he set up at the local video store. He zooms along in his expensive car doing various errands, such as waiting at South Street Seaport for anybody else left in the world (he set up a repeating message on every AM frequency). Despite the fact that we've seen the set-up in hundreds of zombie movies, and the fact that this is the fourth version of Richard Matheson's book to make it to the screen, this is a genuinely mesmerizing film

The supporting roles are mostly cameos. There are some flashbacks to where Neville is taking his wife(Salli Richardson)  and daughter (Willow Smith, Will Smith's real daughter) to a last minute escape, and then near the end a woman Anna(Alice Braga) and a boy named Ethan(Charlie Tahan) show up. But the only one that makes any real impact is Dash Mihok as the lead zombie. While he's mostly CGI, he gives emotion to a one note character.

This is one really cool way to waste a couple of hours this weekend, that is if you haven't seen “Golden Compass” yet.

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