'I Am Legend'

Rating:

BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

December 14, 2007

If there has to be a last man on Earth, may he be as well equipped to cope as Will Smith.

As New Yorker Richard Neville, the sole survivor of a viral pandemic, Smith demonstrates the speedway acumen of a NASCAR pro, the hunting instincts of Davy Crockett and a taste for high-end French impressionist painting that seems suspiciously in sync with a famous museum's permanent collection.

Neville is such a renaissance man of the urban jungle, it may take an extra moment before you register that he is a scientist by trade, albeit one with a lot of extra time on his hands for cultivating survival skills.

"I Am Legend" is the third official screen adaptation of a 1954 Richard Matheson novel, but it takes many of its stylistic cues from Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later," in which a lone band of Englanders duke it out with zombies. Where that film was based in London, it also relied for its impact upon the how-did-they-do-that astonishment of seeing familiar city streets magically drained of their quotidian hustle and bustle.

Stitched together from the disparate sensibilities of screenwriters Akiva Goldsman and Mark Protosevich, "I Am Legend" asks the bottom-line question: What good is owning a landmark Washington Square town house if there are no dinner guests to invite? That is the implicit conundrum of Smith's virologist, who hunkers in his coveted home with his German shepherd Sam, immune to the virus that wiped out millions three years earlier and turned millions more into man-chomping demons.

Neville spends his days scouting with Sam for wild game in the weed-covered streets of New York, which are still gnarled by the standstill traffic of a failed evacuation attempt. By nights, he walls himself in against the nocturnal threat of the ravenous infected and toils in his cellar laboratory, experimenting in search of an immunizing agent against the virus.

Understandably, Neville is going a bit bonkers. He cruises female mannequins in a video store and commiserates with the male mannequins. (Would someone kindly explain how they got there?) In a scene that qualifies as both Neville's and the film's nadir, Smith parrots dialogue from "Shrek" in an automaton-like stupor.

You know you're in trouble when a movie revolves around one actor and he is given nothing interesting to say. Smith is breezy and engaging company, but even a box-office leviathan needs a little more inspirational wit and wisdom in the face of an apocalypse than hand-me-downs from Eddie Murphy.

But then most everything in "I Am Legend" feels lifted from elsewhere, including those frenzied, Boyle-esque zombies. Even the Van Goghs and Rousseaus in Neville's eat-in kitchen appear to be on loan from MoMA. Does a brilliant scientist have the right to appropriate art masterpieces, even if he is the last man on Earth? What do I know? I am critic. I'm no legend.

I AM LEGEND (PG-13). Will Smith and a trusty dog fight off zombies after a virus wipes out the world. The rendering of post-apocalypse New York City is suitably creepy, but the rest is hogwash. 1:40 (intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence). At area theaters.