Movie Review, by Skip Sheffield

Published December 14th, 2007

Will Smith Tries to Save the Human race in “I Am Legend”

Three stars

New York’s a lonely town when you’re the only normal boy around.

Will Smith is the last man in a sealed-off Manhattan in the year 2012 in the sci-fi doomsday thriller “I Am Legend.”
Smith is the legend of the title: Air Force Lt. Colonel Robert Neville.

The film begins with a brief glimpse at a television broadcast in which a woman in a white smock (Emma Thompson) states she has developed a virus that will fight and cure cancer.

Uh-oh. Flash forward to 2012 and we see Will Smith, bombing through the deserted, weedy streets of New York in a bright red Shelby Mustang with his trusty German Shepherd Sam by his side. Smith is attempting to bag deer on the fly.
Two things immediately struck me as absurd: why is he trying to hunt deer in a noisy, bright car, and how can the car be so bright and shiny when everything else is dirty and trashed?

“Legend,” adapted from a 1954 novel by Richard Matheson and directed by Francis Lawrence, is that kind of movie. Lawrence favors visual style over sense.

Lt. Neville has hunkered down in his Washington Square brownstone, which is fortified and stocked with the necessities of life. In the basement is a laboratory where Neville hopes to develop a cure for the virus that has turned all surviving humans into howling, hairless vampires. For reasons never explained, Smith is immune, and so is his dog. Everything else comes out at night and wreaks havoc on what is left of the city.

Every day Smith sends out a radio signal asking any survivors to meet him at the dock at noon where the U.S.S. Intrepid is berthed.

One day a beautiful young woman named Annie (Alice Braga) hears the signal and arrives with her young son just in time to save Neville from a vampire attack.

How she does this is not explained, but it does set up the touching finale that ends the story on a note of hope. Full of gimmicks and CGI trickery, “Legend” is redeemed by a heartfelt performance by Will Smith.

“Atonement” is a film for hardcore romantics.

Three and a half stars

Set on a beautiful English country estate in 1935, the film begins with domestic intrigue fired by Briony Tallis (the ethereal Saoirse Ronan), a highly imaginative 13-year-old who has a bad crush on Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), the son of the groundskeeper.

The master of the estate has taken a shine to Robbie and paid for his education at Cambridge.

Briony’s older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) has taken a shine to Robbie as well. Briony watches Cecilia flirt with Robbie and tempt him by jumping into a fountain in her bloomers.

Later Briony sees Cecilia in even more intimate action with Robbie, and when a young girl is violated on the estate grounds, she falsely accuses Robbie of the dirty deed.

The lies of a 13-year-old girl effectively ruin Robbie’s life, but not his love for Cecilia. After serving five years hard time, Robbie is released on the condition he enlists in the British Army, just in time for the disastrous battle of Dunkirk.

“Atonement’ is a beautiful, heartbreaking film that ends with a satisfying coda by Vanessa Redgrave as the sad, penitent Briony.