Robert Neville (Will Smith) is the last man on Earth. Or, at least he thinks he is, the military scientist and his trusty canine companion trolling the daylight streets of New York hunting game and forging for food in the city’s myriad of abandoned apartments. It is a lonely existence, and at times Robert can’t help but wonder about his sanity, but he cannot quit now. This is ground zero. This is where it began. This is the place where he simply must find a cure.

Will Smith is the last man on Earth in Warner Bros.' I Am Legend

For what, you ask? He is looking for the solution to a viral outbreak which has devastated humanity, a once hopeful cure for cancer instead turning its test subjects into crazed vampiric zombies hungry for human flesh and unable to live in the glare of the sun. Robert must save them, find the cure to reverse the plague. But time is running out. The infected are getting smarter and the scientist’s sanity really does hang by a thread, and if he doesn’t find the solution soon life as we all remember it will vanish from the face of the planet forever.

It goes without saying that I Am Legend, the third adaptation of Richard Matheson’s classic short story, bares little to no resemblance to the source material which inspired it. Everything has changed, both the 1964 Vincent Price potboiler The Last Man On Earth and the giddily hilarious 1971 Charlton Heston adaptation The Omega Man actually more faithful re-workings than this. One can’t help but wonder why they kept the title at all, and anyone who fell in love with the author’s shockingly sinister prose sure to come out of this more than a tad displeased.

Which is actually a little unfortunate, because for about an hour or so there director Francis Lawrence (Constantine) and writers Mark Protosevich (Poseidon) and Akiva Goldsman (The Da Vinci Code) really had me going. The sights and sounds the filmmakers deliver are truly extraordinary, and if you thought the sight of a deserted Big Apple was something in Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky just wait until you set your eyes on this.

Better than that, Lawrence and company craft an intriguingly believable milieu for all the individual chaos to live in. Sure Neville’s relationship with his dog or his conversations with random department store mannequins can’t help but echo similar chats between Tom Hanks and his favorite volleyball Wilson but so what? These scenes crackle with surreal authenticity, and the longer the film goes one the more these relationships become more eerily heartfelt and uncomfortably profound.

It all culminates in the scientist’s first foray into a darkened building. It is at this point the director starts clicking on each and every one of his cylinders, and from the way our hero hides the glare of his weapon’s flashlight with the palm of his hand to our first sight of a group of the infected huddled in a corner feeding the tension Lawrence is able to create borders on the unbearable. It all culminates in one of the most heart-pounding and pulse-racing chases we’ve seen this year, the glorious safety of sunlight seldom as cinematically rapturous as it is here.

Unfortunately, this narrow escape is also the exact point when I Am Legend begins to falter. The director starts moving things down far more predictable paths, dutifully covering ground Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and even Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil trampled far more eloquently. Worse, he becomes obsessed with CGI, the infected looking as if they just stepped off the motherboard of the latest video game. These aren’t people, they’re canon fodder, and by the time they started to crash upon the scene in wave after wave of shrieking malevolence I was kind of ready to call it a night and head on home.

Yet all this I could have forgiven had the filmmakers ended things with even a little bit of panache or flare. Instead, they take the easy way out leaving us on a coda that feels as honest and as justified as sucker-punch breaking your nose. The final smells of creative indifference, and for all that Lawrence and company get right the last thirty seconds are enough to shatter all that good will into devastatingly second-rate pieces. 

Still, it’s not a total loss. Smith is downright exceptional here (even better then he was in his Oscar nominated turn in The Pursuit of Happyness) while David Lazan (The Hitcher) and Naomi Shohan’s (Must Love Dogs) production design as good as any I’ve seen this year. I just wish Lawrence could have sustained the momentum and vision on display in the first half. If he had, maybe than I Am Legend would have actually lived up to its title instead of becoming just another ordinary Hollywood disappointment.

Film Rating: êê1/2  (out of 4)

Additional Links:

-  I Am Legend Theatrical Trailer