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‘I Am Legend’

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Francis Lawrence (“Constantine”) was clearly not the best choice to helm the latest adaptation of Richard Matheson’s 1954 classic sci-fi/horror blender that spawned “The Last Man on Earth” and “The Omega Man.” Will Smith plays super-buff military virologist Robert Neville, the last man alive after a cancer-cure virus wipes out all of civilization — at least in and around Manhattan where Neville hunts deer from his Mustang GTO and holes up inside his West Village home fortress. With his German shepherd Sam, as his sole companion, Neville works in his home lab to find a cure for the pandemic that has turned infected people into flesh-eating vampires that come out nightly to feed. Once you get past the film’s impressive visuals of a desolate Manhattan moldering amid asphalt-breaking weeds, the story settles into a run-of-the-mill chase movie punctuated by Neville’s emotional pain. Absent is the level of social allegory that makes Stephen King’s “The Mist” the best horror movie to come along in years. Even “A Boy and His Dog” (1974) carried a stronger punch than this visually transformative but thematically weak movie.

“I Am Legend” kicks off with a promising flashback television news interview where an uncredited Emma Thompson plays a doctor demurely confirming that she has discovered a cure for cancer. The cure turns out to be a man-made virus, but it proves to be a narrative ruse as the scene cuts to Neville hunting hordes of deer with a high-powered rifle from the driver’s seat of his speedy sports car. The damning thing is that he never even manages to shoot one.

When Neville finally gets an easy target in the middle of abandoned Times Square, he gets beat out by a lioness and her male companion — forget about the fact that the big cats could have fed the loner and his dog for weeks to come. The misjudged sequence merely shows that our protagonist isn’t as desperate as his environment indicates, for if he were he would surely have tried considerably harder to bring home some warm protein. Instead, Neville settles for opening up a jar of pasta sauce and canned vegetables for he and the dog to eat. There’s insult added to injury when Sam refuses to even eat the vegetables put on a plate the same size as Neville’s dish. The humor is smirky and the tone is deliberately idle.

Dream sequences transport us back to Neville’s reality some three years earlier when his wife and daughter attempted to escape New York before its bridges fell along with the population of the city. Now, Neville broadcasts an invitation on AM radio for any survivors to meet him at South Street Seaport where he goes every day at noon to wait for any sign of life.

With the city crawling with infected zombies, Neville excels in capturing rabid test subjects for his research. He straps the toothy hairless creatures down on his examination table to howl at the effects of trial medications he pumps into them while taking copious video notes and keeping a Polaroid bulletin board file that makes him seem like some twisted serial killer.

For a movie made up of a few genuine shocks and some memorable special effects, it’s surprising how little suspense there is and how little story the filmmakers expect to coast on. Like most American movies, this one has a revenge theme that runs a mile wide. If our fearless protagonist comes up a little short when he acts irrationally out of rage, it’s all right because a ghost in the screenwriting machine can rescue him. That kind of mechanical device might have worked for filmgoers 50 years ago, but it doesn’t cut it in the 21st century. By the standards of “I Am Legend,” humanity was wiped out before the movie was made. CV

‘The Golden Compass’

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By Cole Smithey

The hullabaloo surrounding any “anti-religious” theme to Philip Pullman’s 1995 “His Dark Materials” trilogy (the title is taken from Milton’s “Paradise Lost”) takes a distant backseat to screenwriter/director Chris Weitz’s spotty film adaptation that never locates a through line to the convoluted narrative. Newcomer Dakota Blue Richards plays Lyra Belacqua, a 12-year-old orphan raised at Oxford College, under the supervision of her uncle Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), a scientist and explorer intent on traveling to the Arctic Circle to examine golden dust that connects mystical worlds. Coincidentally, a Nazi-like group called the Magisterium (a reference to the Roman Catholic teaching authority) has been kidnapping children and spiriting them off to a compound in the Arctic to separate the youth from their daemons (souls) which manifest as alter ego pets that can change species, at least until the child’s personality becomes fixed. Belacqua is inexplicably and secretly given the last Golden Compass (also called an Alethiometer), a device that ascertains the underlying truth to any question asked of it. With no idea of how to use the compass, she is an easy mark for one slinky and cunning Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman) to abscond with the rebellious girl and her furry daemon (voiced by Freddie Highmore) in order to steal the compass for the Magisterium’s use. Unmotivated chase scenes and erratically violent fight sequences punctuate the story’s time warp setting that seems to fall somewhere between World War I and II.

When Belacqua escapes Mrs. Coulter’s diabolical clutches, she is befriended by a group of gypsies called “gyptians.” Whether Romanian or Egyptian refugees, the name causes confusion and consternation whenever it’s used. Serafina (Eva Green) is a friendly “witch,” although she seems like more of a fairy that periodically visits Belacqua to help her on her journey. Sam Elliott pulls his trademark cowboy duty as Lee Scorseby, a balloon aviator who points our hero toward a polar bear named Iorek (voiced by Ian McKellen) ostensibly to protect her. However, Iorek serves mainly to grind a personal axe against the North’s polar bear king Ragnar (Ian McShane) in a brutal fight sequence that ends in a particularly violent and shocking fashion.

The CGI daemons (cartoon monkey, rat, rabbit and cat) are strictly second-rate in a movie inevitably about war at a time when most audiences are battle-fatigued from the world’s tumultuous state of affairs. None of the characters attract anywhere near the level of empathy that accompanied those of “The Chronicles of Narnia,” much less the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. However entertaining the literary source material for “The Golden Compass” might be, we never get a sense of how the quirky clockwork device is used to secure and protect the ideal of “free will” that Pullman posits as the highest value for his protagonists. One perceived effect of the war in Iraq could be that there are no decent movies to take the little ones to this holiday season, except for the dumbed-down approach of “Alvin and the Chipmunks.” “The Golden Compass” is designed to open the way for sequels to follow, but judging from the poor quality of the first bloated installment it hardly seems an endeavor worth pursuing. CV

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