"Legion" with Paul Bettany, Dennis Quaid, Lucas Black, Tyrese Gibson
Ed Augusts
Southerners in the Mojave, and also what look like Zombies. And an
ice cream truck. And one horrific hard-to-kill grandma.. . Wait a
minute, maybe I should start again! But WHERE to start?
The film editing is BAD! In one scene, the folks in the little
country diner have been alerted that something bad is on the way for
them. They gaze off into the glare of a dusty hot afternoon and the
feeling is -- something is coming NOW!! Whoops!. There's a sudden
1/5th of a second mini-glitch, and suddenly we're in the same diner,
but it is now night -- completely dark! -- there is no explanation how
we got from 4 o'clock in the afternoon to may 10 o'clock at night in
less than 1 second. MAYBE IT WAS A MIRACLE!
Offensive to some may be scenes in which a woman who 8 months into a
pregnancy that may result in a future Messiah of Mankind, is also an
avid smoker, (that must be where the R-rating came from, well, other
than the swearing). She's a woman who doesn't know who the father of
the child is, who is planning to give the baby up for adoption rather
than keep it. She is, in a simple phrase, an unworthy vessel for a
Savior of Mankind. You get the feeling you don't really like her too
much. How dumb -- 8 months pregnant and smoking! Someone should take
that baby away-- whoops! That's what the Angels WANT to do! Or
clobber it, anyway! When she gives birth, she shoots that baby out in
less than a minute, I've seen subs that take longer to make at
Subway, She goes running off two minutes later as if she never had a
baby at all -- it's a miracle!
You want to see wings? There are wings, and very nice ones, in this
movie, but you have to wait a bit before you see any... like -- about
an hour and fifteen minutes! The here shadow of Michael's wings in
the opening moments, which he plucks anyway, don't count. Before you
see angel's wings, you will get to see hundreds of millions of the
wings of flies or other flying vermin.
There are lengthy, lugubrious silences as the film is stalling for
time, unwilling to admit the plot elements of the flick that really
matter could have been condensed into the length of a good Superbowl
commercial. When the film does give us some dialogue, there is always
a kind of "sinking feeling" caused by the fact that silence would be
preferable to anything these writers have written for this script.
There are things you just KNOW you've seen before, somewhere, in one
or another horror movie. There is a nifty plague of flies that you
see coming up over the horizon, coming closer and closer. But the
actors scramble into the diner, and the flies just keep going; in two
seconds, they're gone and never mentioned again. If there were lots
of different visitations of horrors, like in the 10 Plagues of Egypt,
it might be more exciting. But being a low-budget film, the pesky
flies, which never do hurt anyone, are just about all this flick can
manage. At least they come out of a nifty-looking cloud. The cloud is
suspenseful, when seen in the distance. When it turns out to be 100
million flies, and then they're gone without hurting anybody -- it
comes across as just plain dumb! Other than that -- let's see! -- an
Ice Cream man who arrives in an Ice Cream truck. Maybe Stephen King
could have written that scene to be horrific, but King wasn't involved
in any way with this picture.
Oh, I forgot! There IS a Plague of Cars. The cars are driven by
ordinary people whose faces are all going Blahblahblahblahblahblahblah
really fast! If you are told you are watching a film about the
Apocalypse, wouldn't it surprise you to know the Apocalypse is being
ushered in by ordinary people in an automobile convoy? We are told
there are angels inside the humans who come towards the diner like
remote-controlled zombies. But angels wouldn't be so dumb or so
ineffective. Let's face it, guys! Those zombies didn't have a Legion
of angels inside them, the producers of this movie were trying to save
money.
The desert diner itself is reminiscent of the place a bunch of
townsfolk got stuck in "Tremors" with Kevin Bacon a dozen years ago.
Although, in truth, we've all seen diners like this before, including
a few episodes of "Twilight Zone".
There are lots of people calling each other "bitch" and similar words,
often with an ethnic twist. This movie is certainly no stranger to
the "F" word. There are some surprisingly offensive characters in
this movie; one of them is the granny, one of the best moments of the
movie, and occurring before you start to realize how boring the movie
is going to be; a granny who has remarkable abilities of clambering
across the ceiling and biting people on the neck; you don't see too
many grannies like that these days! She uses bad language in a way
that can really hurt!
God and his Angels stand behind this offensive granny, and they do all
the bad things that happen in this movie, since we're told the angels
are kind-of possessing the bodies of the humans who want to assault
the diner. Because of this evil from above, God and Gabriel take a
"hit" in this movie, because God is indirectly accused of being a
cruel character, a petulant taskmaster. And his "Generals" (angels
like Gabriel), are even worse; they are uncompromising. They follow
the Word of God explicitly. In this movie, doing THAT turns out to be
wrong!
There is a WONDERFUL battle between archangels in this movie, but even
THAT may prove to be somewhat disappointing. We don't see legions of
angels, for budgetary reasons, I guess, we only see TWO angels during
the entire movie. Archangel Michael (Bettany) is so "on the side" of
mankind that he tears his own wings out. Gabriel, like a humorless
Roman warrior who wandered off from some adjacent gladiator movie,
comes across like a heartless jerk, a mere "Yes Man", of the All-
Powerful I Am What I Am & That's All That I Am.
Now, after absorbing what I've said so far about this movie, I would
like to leave you with this further revelation ----- "Legion" isn't
nearly as GOOD as I've made it sound in the course of this review.
There is a stupid quote which the movie uses near the start of the
movie. It sounds really stupid when you first hear it. Then the
Hollywood jerk-heads come back at the very END of the movie and use it
again. The line goes something like: "Why was God so angry at
mankind? Maybe he was just tired of all the bullshit!"
THAT quote the perhaps the most sensible thing anyone says in this
movie!
Have fun, avoid this picture if you can, even if someone else is
paying for it, or you have a chance to see it in a cut-rate theatre.
It won't make you like it any the more. And visit my website:
http://www.edaugusts.com