Life sucks for the last man left alive in New York City. There's nothing to watch but old DVDs of the Today Show, the escaped zoo lions are running around eating all the game and just try and get a frapuccino anywhere. Oh, but things could be a lot worse - you could be the last man left alive in New York except for Rex Reed who keeps banging on your door at three in the morning wanting sex. How long would it be before you shot Rex and dragged his carcass out into the street for the buzzards? Not very long.
I Am Legend places Will Smith in a situation something like that outlined above (except for the stuff about Rex Reed). Will plays an army scientist (takes a second to get with the idea of Will playing a scientist, but all right) who got stuck in New York City after a new cancer cure turned into some kind of supervirus and killed most of the people and left most of the rest looking like Iggy Pop after a rough weekend. Now Will holes up at night in his super-reinforced Washington Square town house with his faithful dog Sam, and during the daytime goes out to shoot at deer with his big ole gun and hit golf balls off the tail of an SR-71 parked on the deck of the USS Intrepid. He has to stay inside at night cause the Iggy Pops are blood-thirsty vampire dudes who hiss and gnash their teeth, but get burned by UV rays during the daytime (thank God they never heard of Neutrogena Ultra Sheer Dry-Touch). When he's not listening to Bob Marley or hanging out with his mannequin friends at the DVD store, Will spends his time in his basement lab trying to find a cure for the Iggy Pop plague, but most of his test rats either die or behave like Perez Hilton when he's off his meds.
Will Smith has always run sort of 50/50 with his movie choices - he'll do something nice and amusing like Men in Black or I, Robot (yes, I liked I, Robot, so suck it) and then he'll turn around and do Wild Wild West or Men in Black 2. I Am Legend, I'm happy to announce, falls on the "good" side of Smith's ledger. Actually, I think it's probably the best thing he's ever done (never bothered seeing Pursuit of Happyness, mostly because of the kid). This is an incredibly suspenseful movie, not insultingly stupid or in-your-face like a lot of supposed blockbuster entertainments. What impressed me about it so much was how quiet it is. Amazingly, there are whole long stretches where you just get to watch Smith doing his daily post-Apocalypse Survivorman thing, and there's no portentous music or other silly Hollywood crap being thrust at you; there's no sense that the director thinks you're a 14-year-old boy who needs to have his attention drawn back from his cell-phone or his Gameboy or his willie or whatever the hell else is distracting him.
I have to say - and this may make me seem like a dope - but I pretty much went for all of this, even the last act which a lot of critics have ripped because it seems to veer off too far into the hokey/spiritual side of things. It's at least a physically impressive film with all the urban desolation and grass growing up through the streets and the lonely echoes as Smith fires his gun amid the empty skyscrapers which have become like the pyramids of the Maya, mutely testifying to the folly of a dead civilization. You can bitch all you want about the insane money Hollywood often spends on making crap, but watching a movie like this, one becomes grateful for all that wretched excess. This is what Hollywood does best when it's on its game - these absurdly well-detailed, fully-imagined depictions of fantasy worlds. Plus, Will Smith doing pull-ups - that's never a bad thing, you know?
