Another Movie Guide

Legion Review It’s Die Hard in a Manger

Meet small town waitress Charlie (Adrianne Palicki), her slightly slow platonic boyfriend Jeep (Lucas Black), and a handful of snooty travelers. They’re holed up in a run-down gas station in the New Mexico desert. Why? It’s the apocalypse… or an apocalypse, anyway, one of many variations on the end of the world featured in modern filmdom. This time God has lost faith in humanity and has sent a legion of monsters to tear our heroes to shreds. Their only hope of survival is Michael (Paul Bettany) a rebel angel bent on protecting Charlie’s unborn child.

What looked to be a modern day action-horror nativity story in the Legion trailers reveals itself to be a melodramatic and illogical mess when expanded to two hours. Director Scott Stewart’s close-in camera work during the action sequences turns potentially epic battles into smash-cut montages of feet, car tires, and ejected shell casings. Contrived lulls in the demon/zombie assault give Stewart and screenwriter Peter Schink ample time to force their characters to confide in each other in an attempt to drum up audience sympathy, but Charlie is a shrew, Michael is practically a robot, and the other travelers are so annoying that you’ll be glad when they die. Jeep is thoughtful, altruistic, and reasonably well developed as a character, but since he does nothing at all for the entire movie, he must have gotten lost on his way to another (better) story.

Thanks to terrible dialogue, the characters’ exchanges rarely make any sense, but neither does the plot, so at least the writers are being consistent. Why is God suddenly in favor of mankind’s annihilation? If he’s powerful enough to turn regular people into a legion of the damned, can’t he tell them to set off all the nukes instead of letting them slowly eat their way through their six billion friends? What do Jeep and Charlie’s visions have to do with all of this… and who names their kid Jeep, anyway? The movie steadfastly refuses to explain, trying desperately to draw attention away from its flaws with obvious jokes, bloodletting, and a soundtrack of increasingly frantic choir wails.

I can only conclude that if God is trying to wipe out the human race, he isn’t trying very hard. A couple of zombies, a creepy little kid with a butcher knife, and a wall-climbing granny with shark teeth are easily dealt with by any idiot with a shotgun. However, if God is trying to stop me from wanting to see any more movies, he got halfway there just by sending Legion.