Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
2/3/10
We've been through this before,
but it bears repeating. All of us have certain movie subgenres that
just ping the hell out of us. Within those subsets of themes and
cliches, all the filmmakers have to do is step over a certain bar set somewhere
around the waist for their movie to give us what we're looking for.
A lot goes right and a lot goes wrong with Legion, Scott Stewart's
new movie that views the Biblical Apocalypse through the eyes of a middle-of-nowhere
diner where its pivotal battle is to be fought between humans and angels.
Some will look at the swiss cheese plot and inadequate lead performance
by Lucas Black and throw up their hands, but for me, well, Stewart had
me at Biblical Apocalypse, and for fans of that genre, Legion's
good stuff is very good indeed.
Archangel Michael (Paul Bettany)
falls from the Heavens, slices off his wings, loads up on automatic weapons
and is stopped by two police officers, one of whom transforms into what
looks like a demon. Michael escapes and races out of town as all
the city's lights go out and “it begins”. At a small diner/gas station/auto
repair shop that seems to be the small town of Paradise Falls, we meet
Charlie (Adrianne Palicki) a very pregnant young woman itching to be rid
of the baby and under the care of Jeep Hanson (Lucas Black), who is very
much not the father but wishes to apply for that job. Jeep is the
son of the diner's owner Bob (Dennis Quaid), who's a bitter old wreck after
blowing everything on his dream that a mall would be built nearby and make
this prime real estate. Joining them on this particular day are his
cook Percy (Charles S. Dutton), lost tough guy Kyle (Tyrese Gibson) and
the Anderson family, father Howard (Jon Tenney), mother Sandra (Kate Walsh)
and daughter Audrey (Willa Holland). An old woman (Jeanette Miller)
shows up, makes a nasty scene and then turns demonic herself and bites
Howard in the neck before being shot. An attempt to drive him to
the hospital is cut off by a vicious swarm of flies. And then Michael
arrives just a step ahead of armies of possessed people looking to kill
Charlie's baby. Thing is, they're not possessed by demons:
it's angels, sent by an angry God to exterminate the species in whom he's
lost faith. Only by saving the unborn child can humanity be saved,
and to do that, Michael will have to turn back all the forces of Heaven,
including his brother Gabriel (Kevin Durand).
Accuse Legion of a
multitude of sins, but don't include a lack of ambition. The script
by Stewart and Peter Schink produces a Romeroesque zombie apocalypse, but
makes the ghouls angels and blames God, and then spends the remainder of
its running time dealing with the implications (as well as turning every
“good and true” person it can find, from toddlers to ice cream men, into
murderous fiends). Michael's attempt to “give God what he needs instead
of what he wants” is a pretty bold jumping-off point, but the script is
filled with clues (note how many characters describe the decisions that
led to their current circumstances while commenting that they can't explain
why they made them) that its events are as much a test of all involved
as a final Judgment. While I'm not a religious man, the Apocalypse
genre does fascinate me, and Legion is fairly unique in suggesting
that God might “change his mind” and do something Revelations doesn't lay
out. And why not, it IS His universe, after all. What's perhaps
its boldest and wildest stroke is the cruelty and viciousness it assigns
to the angels carrying out God's will. But, I suppose a few millennia
of bowing down to a race now being tossed out with the trash might make
you a little bitter.
I'm also partial to stories
where events of global significance play out among a few people in the
middle of nowhere, and while Legion isn't so great at explaining
all the whys of its Terminator-inspired “save the baby, save the
world” plot, it does a good job of plowing forward with it once the baby
becomes its McGuffin. The movie doesn't hurt for action or suspense,
and I was surprised by just how much I got into the climax. Hard
to have a deck more thoroughly stacked against you than being on the wrong
side of God Himself.
A big reason why all this
works is that Bettany is really, really good as Michael, and hits just
about all of his big scenes out of the park. It's kinda delightful
to see the British character actor reinvented as a buff ass-kicker, and
he makes the most of far and away the movie's best part. There are
lots of good performances, with Quaid taking up the grumpy character actor
mantle, Gibson balancing a believable character with the “I can't believe
this crap!” moments, Walsh making us want to feed her to the angels before
she makes any more trouble, and Dutton, Palicki, and Holland all doing
everything the script asks of them.
The same can't be said of
Black, who punts the pivotal role of Jeep. We're asked to believe
this guy epitomizes everything about humanity that deserves to live on:
always putting others ahead of himself and never giving up. Instead,
he comes off like a pathetic dimwit, because the part requires the actor,
not the dialog, to supply that nobility and Black spends all his time looking
down and speaking like he was reading his lines off cue cards. It's
a really poor performance for a movie with this good of a cast.
But the former American
Gothic star isn't Legion's only problem: clearly the 90-odd
minutes we see have been shorn down from a considerably longer cut, and
even what we see has issues. At one point, a montage takes us from
mid-afternoon through nighttime as the characters board up the diner on
Michael's orders. Only when they're done does anyone ask him who
he is. The movie makes a very pained point of beginning on December
23 to shoehorn in two fairly obvious jokes about Christmas, both of which
seem to have been added in post-production while no one ever acknowledges
the season in the dialog. And don't get me started on the clumsy,
dreadful narration by Palicki that opens the film, and then is inexplicably
trotted out verbatim again to close it. John Frizzell's score is,
uh, emphatic, which is cool at the movie's best moments, but just goofy
the rest of the time.
So, yeah, you can hear the
loose change of unemptied pockets rattling around Legion's dryer
enough to drive those not predisposed to buy what it's selling nuts.
But of all the excuses filmmakers have drempt up to lock a bunch of characters
together in a secluded building while inhuman creatures lay siege to them,
this is a pretty good one, and the movie runs the Living Dead/Precinct
13 formula quite effectively. When Bettany's on-screen, it's
even better than that. And at a time when barely a movie weekend
passes without the End of the World, it's cute to see a movie shout back
upstairs: “Hey, God, give us another chance!” He might even
listen: the world is not scheduled to end in either of next weekend's
wide releases. |
