Will Smith usually makes the kind of big-budget, wisecracking comedy action fare I hate, so I didn't have particularly high hopes for I Am Legend – I went to the cinema fully expecting the same bad jokes and blatant product placement that all but ruined the could-have-been-great I, Robot.
Thankfully, Big Willy Style keeps his more irritating acting tics in check for I Am Legend, and while the product placement is still in evidence (Apple iPods and iMacs are seemingly ubiquitous), it's nowhere near as distracting or galling as I, Robot's appalling shoe commercial.
Set in a post-apocalyptic New York (99% of the world's population has been wiped out by a virus created by Emma Thompson, of all people), the film opens with some quite stunning shots of sole survivor Robert Neville (Smith) driving through the deserted city. These early scenes are excellent, and Smith's performance as a lonely, desperate man is (for him at least) understated and touching. The score is similarly low-key: the soundtrack is occasionally silent, lending an eery, desolate quality to certain moments.
For the first third of the film, I Am Legend barely puts a foot wrong: we watch Smith as he wanders the city by day and locks himself away at night in his fortress-laboratory, his refuge from the infected, vampire-like night stalkers that dwell outside. A few concise, well directed flashbacks give us further insight into Smith's tortured past, showing his doomed attempts to evacuate his family from the disease stricken city.
It's when Smith finally stumbles across a 'hive' of night stalkers that the movie begins to falter. The antagonists are revealed (in an otherwise tense scene) to be a horde of identical, bald CGi humanoids that bite and head butt, Keith Flint style. While the film isn't completely ruined by their presence, it's difficult to imagine why the creatures couldn't have been made with good old-fashioned prosthetics - it worked for Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later and countless other films. As it is, we're left with a bunch of monsters that looked like they've wandered in from a Resident Evil game.
For a mainstream Hollywood movie, there are some interesting ideas in here: it's implied in certain scenes that the night stalkers aren't quite the mindless cannibals Neville thinks they are, and the film as a whole is subtle, thought provoking, and not the mindless blast-fest that I was expecting. After six months of gaudy, noisily upbeat films such as Transformers and Diehard 4.0, it's refreshing to watch a movie that's brave enough to be this bleak and gloomy.
I Am Legend is sadly marred by the unconvincing CG antagonists and a denouement that is too neat and abrupt to satisfy – after a slow and assured buildup, the final act is over and dealt with in twenty minutes. Without these flaws, the film could perhaps have been a classic piece of apocalyptic cinema.