Todd's Take on I Am Legend

** Spoilers Below **

I watched I Am Legend last week, and after several days of thinking, I've decided that it was a combination of scary-to-the-point-of-almost-pooping-myself and a let-down.

It's really scary. They did a great job of using the emptiness of New York City to keep you on your toes the whole time. I spent most of the hour and a half holding onto the guy next to me (yes, it was a dude, and no, we weren't on a date. It was a guys movie night with some friends from church), as we waited for the next startling zombie encounter.

Despite the great suspense and special effects used to turn NYC into a jungle, the movie was an overall let-down. They tried to span both a blockbuster, big-budget action film and a last-man-on-earth character story, and missed both targets.

On the blockbuster side, all the big sweeping shots of an empty New York set a very large stage that the story underutilized. The main antagonist, a zombie gang leader, only showed up in a few scenes. His intelligence was under appreciated by Will Smith's character early on, and so encounters felt flat instead of crescendoing towards the finale. It was short (101 minutes), so they could have spent a few more scenes developing the rivalry between Will Smith and the zombie leader, and thereby making the heroic final fight more climactic.

Because they tried to do both an epic movie and character piece, Will Smith's character development left wanting. They had a chance to delve more into his psychosis after years of being alone, and show only brief references to the empty city around him. But instead they had him golfing off an aircraft carrier and hunting with a Ford Mustang, making his few revelatory scenes feel cheap.

I guess I'm being a little snobby, but when you have all the ingredients to make a delicious Todd's Top 100 Films (more later), and instead you make no-bake cheesecake, I'm gonna get a little upset.

Todd's Rating: