Legion: Horrifyingly bad
Good news: God exists. Bad news: He wants you dead. Good news: Turns out he’s not so bright.
The world’s been ending a lot lately, at least in movie theaters. We’ve been bombarded with asteroids, blasted by aliens, and suffered the horrors of climate change. Legion offers a new, more direct approach to global destruction: God is tired of our crap and sends angels to kill us.
Legion could have been a blast. Imagine millions of Terminators, with wings and swords made of fire, cutting a bloody swath across the entire planet. It’s not quite theologically sound, but it would make a good popcorn flick.
Sadly, this is not the case. Legion (directed by Scott Stewart) squanders a decent gimmick on a handful of CGI parlor tricks and mountains of insipid dialogue. The film has no excuse to be this boring.
Charlie (Adrianne Palicki) is a pregnant waitress in a run-down diner along a New Mexico highway. She works for Bob (a tired-looking Dennis Quaid), and rebuffs the wellmeaning advances of Bob’s adult son, Jeep (Lucas Black). All seems well, until a customer, a kind-looking old lady, transforms into a shark-toothed monster and attacks Charlie. After the grandma-monster is put down, Michael, the Archangel, arrives in a stolen police car. He lays on some heavy exposition: The angels are killing everyone and they’re going to focus their attack on this diner. Why? Because Charlie’s unborn baby (for some reason we never learn) is the future savior of the human race.
Hi, I’m an angel, you’re pregnant with Jesus, and God’s trying to kill you. Seriously.
Luckily for our human friends— which also include a stranded family of well-heeled urbanites, a black-dude-with-a-checkered-past (a type-cast Tyrese Gibson), and a one-handed fry-cook — God is doing things the hard way. He’s not just sending in the angels to kill humans; that would make too much sense. The angels are possessing weak-minded humans instead. It’s like demon-possession, but, you know, with angels. These angel-zombies attack the diner en masse, and Michael helps the humans fend off the possessed horde with a few stolen guns. This proves to be not too difficult, considering that these angel-zombies, though energetic, are about as vulnerable as regular zombies. Shoot ‘em, beat ‘em, or burn ‘em: They go down pretty easy.
The acting ranges from adequate to abysmal. Paul Bettany injects some charisma into angel Michael, even if his role calls for only two emotions: concern and vague regret. Quaid growls his way through yet another “dad” role, while Black is whiny, sullen, and generally annoying. Palicki is pretty and not much more as pregnant Charlie, who has a habit of asking questions that the screenwriters clearly don’t know the answer to.
And then there’s the story itself. The premise — a motley group of everyday folks under siege by some unknown evil — is a familiar one. Some of the best examples of these films, such as Night of the Living Dead and The Mist, share a common theme: When faced with an external threat, the greatest danger comes from within the group. Bickering and power struggles weaken the group, allowing the evil outside to gain the upper hand. This is a time-honored cinematic trope, which Legion blithely ignores. In place of self-destructive small-group politics, we get endless conversations, musings on love, loyalty, faith, and other such high-minded drivel. It’s all about as riveting as a high-school anti-drug lecture. One would expect more from a movie about gun-toting angels.
There are some small patches of activity: a swarm of locusts, a crucifixion- style murder, an Omen-esque creepy kid, and an old lady who skitters across the ceiling. (Leave it to a film called Legion to rip off Exorcist 3). But these scenes, goofy as they are, come too rarely to save this film from festering tedium. The action scenes are either warmed-over, toothless zombie-style killing (the diner party guns down hordes of the possessed) or incoherent blurs of bullets and computer generated angel-wings (the climactic showdown between Michael and Gabriel). Either way, when Legion delivers the goods, the goods aren’t all that good.
On the plus-side, there is some nice-looking camera work.
I once had faith in Legion. I expected the film to be ridiculous and dumb, but still entertaining. I have lost my faith. A plague of locusts should devour the film-stock on which this wretched mush was printed. Apparently, the Lord works in mysterious ways, and apparently, so do screenwriters.
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