While eerie and breathtakingly evocative, the solid I Am Legend nevertheless tries to be too many things to too many people, weighed down with cheap horror-film shock effects and barely passable CGI, instead of trusting in its legitimately captivating last-man-on-Earth scenario.

Will Smith plays Lt. Col. Robert Neville, a military virologist who has inexplicably survived a man-made virus that has wiped out the rest of humankind. The virus began as a miracle cure for cancer (Emma Thompson appears in a short, uncredited cameo as the scientist responsible for the discovery), but quickly mutates into a lethal pathogen that decimates the human population, leaving only a handful of global survivors. Of these, some, like Neville, are immune. But most have mutated into zombie/vampires who cannot tolerate sunlight and only venture out at night to feast on whatever flesh they can find.

Assuming he is the last man on Earth, Neville spends his highly regimented days alongside his German shepherd, Sam, hunting for game in the middle of Times Square, scavenging apartment buildings for supplies, piloting his Shelby Mustang GT through the empty streets of Midtown, sending radio messages out into the unresponsive void and obsessively looking for a way to reverse the virus. But when night comes, Neville retreats to his heavily fortified Washington Square brownstone which, when battened down, becomes a nearly impenetrable fortress, isolating him from the cannibalistic infected who howl manically just outside.

For the first two acts of the film, the infected are barely seen and I Am Legend is all the scarier for it. Unfortunately, the religiously charged final act devolves into an action-packed, quasi-uplifting, all-too-swift monster movie stuffed to the gills with completely CGI humanoids who are never completely convincing and therefore never completely frightening.

Suffering from a sort of cinematic schizophrenia, I Am Legend is unable to sort out whether it is a character-driven examination of the physical, emotional and spiritual lengths to which a man will go to survive in nearly incapacitating isolation (which the film does exceptionally well) or a B-movie horror pic about flesh eating ghouls (which the film does not do so well). While there are moments of pulse-pounding tension, the filmmakers resort to hackneyed shock cuts to make audiences jump in their seats. Forget the tiresome zombie/vampires—the power of this film lies in its initial premise: what must it feel like to be the last person on Earth?

You’ve never seen New York City like this—utterly bereft of human activity. What will haunt you long after you leave the theater is not the film’s baddies, but the desolate, uninhabited cityscape that is Manhattan. Taking a page from Alan Weisman’s recent book, “The World Without Us,” I Am Legend imagines one of the most populated pieces of real estate on the planet as something as desolate and lifeless as a John Ford landscape. Vegetation has begun reclaiming civilization’s monolithic skyscrapers and wildlife has seeped back into the urban jungle. An eerie silence pervades the glass and steel canyons while reprimanding birds are the only sound in a city littered with the flotsam and jetsam of a populace that vanished in the blink of an eye.

Will Smith continues to impress. Perhaps the most bankable star in Hollywood, Smith, last seen in the 2006 holiday tearjerker, The Pursuit of Happyness, treats his sci-fi material with absolute seriousness, all too aware that if we don’t buy his plight, we won’t buy the film entire. Portraying a man cracking under the strain of years without human contact and exhausted by his alternating role of hunter one day and prey the next, Smith’s surprisingly emotional portrayal is riveting. He carries the film, with its long silent passages, literally single-handedly. Comparisons to Tom Hanks in Cast Away (with Sam the dog standing in for Wilson the volleyball) are inevitable and deserved.

I Am Legend is based on the 1954 apocalyptic science fiction novel by Richard Matheson. A handful of adaptations of the book have already been made including 1964’s cheesy The Last Man on Earth, staring Vincent Price, and the 1971 Charlton Heston vehicle, The Omega Man. Ironically, Smith’s version was in pre-production in 2003, under director Michael Bay when Danny Boyle’s remarkably intertextual 28 Days Later appeared on theater screens and caused Bay and team to mercifully pull the plug. Whatever its shortcomings, I Am Legend is easily the strongest of all the versions and, under the assured direction of Francis Lawrence (Constantine), is unquestionably a far superior film to anything Bay would have delivered.

© Copyright 2007 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.