I Am Legend Review

Okay I know I planned to get online yesterday and post about my news and various news items. But I got off track, went to the movies, and decided to do a review.

I bought the dvd Blow on black Friday (or sometime around then) because it was on a really good sale and I enjoyed watching it in theaters years ago. I opened it and I was shocked to find a free movie ticket to see I Am Legend. I was pretty sure I wouldn't use (it was for non-AMC theaters and every close theather is AMC) and I didn't but it did pique my interest in the film. I hadn't heard anything about it because I don't watch TV and the only radio I listen to is NPR and WPFW so I always hear about movies late.

I'm also not a major Will Smith fan. I watched The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Men in Black, and Bad Boys but he just isn't my favorite actor when he's not being funny. I grew up with Parents Just Don't Understand and Nightmare on My Street etc so he's still a goofy teenager in my mind. His movie choices have kind of sucked in my opinion. For every Ali and Pursuit of Happyness there's a Bad Boys 2 and Wild Wild West. Not to mention he turned down the role of Neo (though Jada didn't, girlfriend knew to jump on that money train for the sequels)!!
So it was a matter of hoping the movie would be a good one. I never read the book nor had I seen any of the other film adaptations, but the idea of Will and a dog seemed pretty harmless.

I am happy to say I enjoyed the film. Though I can't speak on how well it kept to the book and I HATE CGI, the film told a good story in an interesting way. The storyline has been done a million times, of course, and that particular story is getting old, but the way the story was told left some points to the imagination. You were required to pick it up along the way (other than obviously major plot points) and you had time to consider some theories of your own along the way. I also enjoyed the lack of many explosions, blood, gore, etc.. The movie has a PG-13 rating and that was refreshing. Not nearly as many pop culture references as in recent movies either (read: Transformers), but the few there were were sort of cute. The first half of the film was really good. I almost missed his life and watching it in the second half, because it was interesting to just see how he made his life livable. In fact, I could have watched that story all day. The second half added the excitement and plot twist, but some of the soul seemed to have been left behind.

Will Smith is doing his "grown man" too. His voice tripped me out throughout the film because it sounded nothing like him. I keep typing words to describe it and deleting them, but it's a mix of something and old. There were very few supporting actors, which was good, because he needed to prove himself without a back-and-forth (though I guess the dog did some of that). Overall, I liked his acting but I sometimes couldn't figure out if he was overdoing it (as he seemed to be) purposefully or accidentally.

Hm. You may think I didn't like the movie based on all of this, but I really did. I have a few more gripes though. The CGI people never looked even slightly realistic and some of the CGI scenes looked pretty bad too. There were some actions and apparent plot lines that went unexplained and the ending in some ways could've been better (without adding a spoiler I will only say that I liked the ending overall but it left some questions unanswered as well). The flaws I mentioned are nitpicky things, however, and when I do that I know I liked the film. I will get this on dvd eventually (though like Blow it may take several years, but then again I'm cheap).

I really did like it!