‘I Am Legend’ goes through the motions

Let me just announce right off the bat that I’m officially sick of zombies—or mutants, or “the infected,” or whatever name you want to attribute to the horror genre phenomenon of an epidemic of human beings turned into ravenous, chaotic cannibals with whom it is impossible to reason. Robert Rodriguez’s self-congratulatory “Planet Terror” was probably my first indication that, perhaps, this line of discussion had not seen a fresh perspective since “Shaun of the Dead.”

About 50 zombie properties later, the final straw came upon realizing that thousands of hipsters everywhere still think it’s ceaselessly hilarious to slather some stage makeup on their faces and shamble around aimlessly. In a cinematic sense, at least, the zombie’s potential for metaphor has been tapped dry—while its capacity for fright has been depleted by countless iterations of action and parody. Will Smith’s latest vehicle, “I Am Legend,” based on the Richard Matheson story of the same name (which actually concerns a vampire epidemic), is just another entry in this endless cycle; let’s just say it falls squarely in the “action” camp and leave it at that.

Oops! It seems that science’s latest attempt to cure cancer has instead resulted in a worldwide plague that has turned much of the surviving population into ravenous, chaotic what-have-yous. Three years later, military scientist Robert Neville (Smith) is the lone inhabitant of New York City, spending his days watching movies and hunting gazelles, and spending his nights locked away with his German shepherd and hoping that the monsters don’t break in. Rest assured that there are action setpieces that follow this scenario of the most forgettable variety, but at least the film proves once and for all that Smith can carry a film quite literally by himself. Which is why you sort of wish that “I Am Legend” did not have to cram so many moments of bored, boring sensationalism into its 100-minute running time—the film could have succeeded if it had more closely followed the terrifying day-to-day routine of the last man on earth, living his life in a never-ending juggling act between long stretches of boredom and trying not to die. (The film shares a strange kinship with Robert Zemeckis’ “Beowulf,” a film that rewrites the titular legend as a tragic hero, a conceit that would have worked had it not set out to become a three-dimensional assault on the eyeballs.)

Perhaps, then, in that hypothetical series of events, the film would have done right by its constant references to New York City as “Ground Zero” by expounding on the frightening uncertainties of war. Or, considering they didn’t want to go down that path, maybe they could have bothered to make their monsters the least bit interesting or frightening. Neville conjectures that the zombie hordes have at last been stripped of every last trace of their former humanity, but throughout the film they exhibit some ever-faint attempts at strategy in attempting to subdue their foe, perhaps signifying the contrary. I would have probably leaped out of my seat had one of these monsters croaked a primitive salutation to our hero after an hour-and-a-half of growling cipher status. But naw, “I Am Legend” is so content to be a pale actioner that offers up the same old crap that you’ve seen a million times before—so stale that even describing these films as such has become a chore.

Throughout the film, Neville finds solace in the works of Bob Marley, eventually describing him as a man who believed that “you could literally cure racism and hatred by injecting people with music and love;” it’s this little interlude that indicates why “I Am Legend” fails on the whole. (Spoiler!) It goes without saying that the atheistic Neville eventually comes to believe in God again, and discovers the cure to both the literal and figurative disease—eventually bringing said cure to the infected by, er... trying and failing to reason with his infected pursuers, determining that they are in fact beyond reason... and capping that all off with, uh... becoming a suicide bomber? The forced attempts at real-life parallel become too confused to accommodate any kind of message; the film is too concerned with stale CGI tomfoolery to actually contemplate the implications of its script. Ultimately, the only thing to take away from “I Am Legend” is the apparent warning that the apocalypse will occur before you’ll get the chance to see a Batman/Superman movie. Thanks for the heads-up.