I Am Legend (2007)

There's a genuinely great film buried somewhere inside I Am Legend. You can feel it in the early stretches, in the eerie quiet of an overgrown Times Square, in Will Smith's careful daily routines, in the devastating bond between a man and his dog. For a good chunk of its runtime, this film is doing something rare for a big studio blockbuster: it's making you feel the weight of true solitude. And then, bit by bit, it throws all of that away.

Smith deserves real credit here. He carries the film almost entirely on his own for long passages, and he's magnetic doing it. There's a clinical precision to how his character moves through each day, checking traps, broadcasting radio signals, maintaining the rituals that keep him sane, and then those moments when the mask slips and the grief underneath comes flooding out. That's compelling, human stuff. The film's best sequences don't need monsters or mayhem. They just need a man rattling around an empty city, holding himself together by the thinnest of threads.

The problem is the Darkseekers. The infected creatures that stalk the night should be the stuff of nightmares, and conceptually they are. But the CGI used to bring them to life is genuinely poor, even by the standards of the time. Their movements are too fast, too exaggerated, too clearly computer-generated to ever feel like a real physical threat. Every time they appear in force, they pull you straight out of the film. Horror lives and dies on believability, and these things just don't have it. It's a shame, because the idea of them is frightening. The execution simply isn't.

And then there's the ending. The theatrical cut's finale is, I'll be straight about it, a betrayal of everything the film spent its first two acts building. The isolation, the psychological depth, the creeping tragedy of a man who might be the last of his kind: all of it gets tossed aside for a rushed, generic climax that turns a potential gut-punch into a forgettable action sequence. It's the kind of ending that feels like it was tested to death in front of focus groups and sanded down until every sharp edge was gone. I've since heard about the alternate ending, which apparently honours the source material far better, and honestly that version sounds like a different film entirely. A better one.

What I Am Legend wants to be is something like The Omega Man crossed with 28 Days Later: a serious, unsettling meditation on survival, humanity and what we lose when civilisation falls. What it actually delivers is a glossy blockbuster that's too nervous to commit to its own darkness. The ambition is visible. The themes are there, grief, purpose, the cost of being the last one standing, but they never fully develop into something meaningful. The film skims the surface of big ideas rather than sitting with them.

It's frustrating because Smith is genuinely doing the work. Watching him here and then watching him carry Men in Black 3 (2012) is a reminder of how much range the man has, and how often big franchise films waste it by prioritising spectacle over character. I Am Legend makes that same mistake in its final act, lurching away from the intimate, eerie tone that made it distinctive and into something you've already seen done better elsewhere.

Two and a half stars. Strong atmosphere, a committed lead performance, and some genuinely haunting imagery of an empty world. But weak creature effects, a tonal inconsistency in the second half, and an ending that actively undercuts the film's best ideas make it impossible to call it anything more than average. Worth watching for Smith and for those early stretches of beautiful, aching quiet. Just don't expect it to stick the landing.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2007  | Watched: 2025-10-15

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