In 2009, Dr. Krippen(Emma Thompson, putting in a too-brief cameo which actually turns out to be one of the better features of the film) announces that she has completed test-ing on just over a thousand human beings with her new drug designed to eradicate cancer. The subjects appear healthy, and there isn't a trace of cancer in their bodies. Cut to three years later, and the Big Apple of 2012 is a deserted ghost town where vegetation has begun to overgrow city streets and where lions and deer roam freely. Living in this shell of a city is scientist Robert Neville(Smith) and his German shep-herd Sam, who hunt for food by day and hole up in a heavily armored house by night. Because at night, the infected walk the streets, also hunting for food.

     See what happened is, Dr. Krippen's cure began a biologi-cal mutation among her test subjects, turning them into canni-balistic ravagers that crave living flesh for food. They can only hunt at night though, because they are extremely sensi-tive to sunlight(in the original book, the infected possessed vampiric tendencies). Neville is a brilliant scientist who was searching for a cure before the plague laid waste to the majority of Earth, and he still determinedly searches for a cure in the well-stocked scientific lab in the basement of his house. Neville is one of the few human beings--estimated to be about two percent of the planet's population--that are naturally immune to the plague, and so believes the cure must lay within his blood. If only he has the time to find it.

     Part of the problem with I Am Legend is that while it does have a clear path as to where it wants to go, it constantly tends to slap its own internal logic in the face. Early on in the film, Neville manages to capture an infected woman in order to experiment on her with the newest version of his projected vaccine. The capture is witnessed by a male zombie(for lack of a better term), who seems to take personal offense to the bodily theft, although it's clearly stated that the infected have lost all sense of standard human interaction and the desire for a societal structure. This contradiction comes into play toward the end of the film(which I'll get to in a moment).

     It's also a bit of a shoddy production, as well as a dozer. Director Francis Lawrence(2005's abysmal Constantine, and only a handful of music videos before that) initially tries to instill the sense of daily tedium Neville must go through in order to gain the audience's empathy, but he only succeeds in making us wish we'd brought our pillows. John Carpenter used the same approach to much greater effect in 1988's They Live, but once the story got started, it was a nerve-tingling jumpstart which never let up. Sadly, Lawrence isn't up to the task here. The shoddiness comes in when we first encounter the infected: originally using actors in prosthetic makeup, Lawrence wasn't happy with the effect and chose to go the CGI route for rendering all the zombies. BAD IDEA. Once again, as with the uninspiring Beowulf, CGI proves inferior to good old-fashioned makeup and ingenuity; the infected look horribly fake, and since we know Smith the actor never has to interact with such obviously digitized creations, we feel no true concern for Neville the character when he "encounters" them.

     The movie's logic continues to receive a thorough pistol-whipping when Neville meets up with two survivors from out of town who picked up his daily transmissions via radio. Brazilian beauty Alice Braga plays Anna, who rescues Neville after he is viciously attacked and wounded by a pack of the infected. Together with Ethan(Charlie Tahan), a young boy in her protective custody, they beat a path for the safety of Neville's house. However, we are almost immediately forced to ponder how in the world Anna and Ethan could have safely made it up to New York all the way from Maryland, and what they planned to do if they couldn't find Neville. It's shown early on that even though Neville's been living in the Big Apple these past three years, there are still houses he's exploring in order to find provisions, and he must take precautions each time he enters. How could Anna have been certain to safely find shelter in an unfamiliar city? The rescue happens toward the climax of the film, and when the infected(led by the inexplic-able Alpha Male from earlier) track down the trio, Anna tells Neville "You were bleeding...they must have followed the trail." How? Anna rescued Neville in her car, and therefore if he was indeed bleeding, all the blood would have pooled on her car floor! Until this bit of happenstance for the sake of moving the plot along, while it's shown the infected can scent blood, there's been no indication whatsoever that they can do so over any great distance.

     There are strengths in I Am Legend however, and they emanate primarily from Will Smith's completely convincing performance as an embittered man teetering on the brink of sanity: unable to fully accept the loss of the human race has actually happened, and yet determined to find a way to pull the survivors--and their infected kin--back from the edge of the abyss. Another interesting point--and one that should have been touched upon in greater frequency--are the flash-backs Neville has to his life pre-apocalypse, when it was believed the disease could still be contained or reversed... and in which he still had a family. While the Smith nepotism is still solidly on display(daughter Willow plays Neville's doomed child Marley), the scenes in which we find out that Neville was an esteemed military scientist whom many believed was the last, best hope for a cure, and in which we come to find out how his family perished, are the times we care the most for the character. It's not often that a post-apocalyptic movie shows how the apocalypse actually happens, and I feel that if the story had focused not on the aftermath but the panic preceding it, it would have been far more satisfying.

     To its credit however, I Am Legend never devolves into lovey-dovey sap. While it would have been easy for screen-writers Mark Protosevich(the upcoming Thor) and Akiva Goldsman(Batman and Robin...that explains a lot!) to imply that Neville and Anna should make attempts to become a new Adam and Eve, or that with Ethan they might found a new family, or even to include a sex scene between Smith and Braga, fortunately no such attempts are ever made. First and foremost, I Am Legend is a survival movie, and the writers and Lawrence were at least smart enough to stay focused on that.

     As for the ending...many have wondered if the film would stick to the book's original ending, wherein the main character dies, or if Smith's ego would keep him from allowing his Neville to perish. I will say that the ending is both true to the book... and not quite. Unfortunately within that ending, we get a twist as unbelievably hokey as the infamous "swing away" from M. Night Shyamalan's unforgivable Signs. It's a moment that will have many rolling their eyes, and more than likely immediate-ly texting their friends to stay away, once the film concludes.

     Going over the movie in my mind, it's hard to see how I Am Legend could ever have been considered by anyone working on it that it would be a great film. It's sullen, it's sad, it's badly executed...and unlike the novel, anything but the stuff of legend.