Movie Review: Legion

Legion

Post-apocalypse stories aren’t new. Terminator, Matrix, Mad Max, Dawn of the Dead… all of them are about life after the end of everything. No matter how bad they are, end of the world stories seem to make for good box office no matter how bad they are. Just look at Roland Emmerich.

Me, I have a soft spot for a particular sub-genre, the Endtimes story. There are a few of them around in both film and literature. I remember watching Gregory Widen’s The Prophecy back on VHS in 1995 and going WOW!. Christopher Walken as Gabriel and Viggo Mortensen as Lucifer… “I can lay you out and fill your mouth with your mother’s feces, or we can talk.”

How can that NOT stick in your head?

It was the first time I had seen angels depicted in such a way. Not benevolent beings that lived in the sky and watched over us, but spiteful, petulant, scorned children. Sure it’s not what they’d have you believe in Catechism class, but it opened up a whole bunch of questions.

I went into Scott Stewart’s Legion without knowing anything about it, but I was surprised to find something similar to that first film. It had a lot of the same themes. Fallen angels, jealousy, children as saviors, violence, etc. It also has a strong ensemble like The Prophecy, including Paul Bettany, Lucas Black, Charles Dutton, Kevin Durand and Dennis Quaid.

The plot involves God losing faith in Man, his most beloved creation and sending down his armies of angels to possess and destroy everyone on Earth. The archangel Michael, tasked with killing an innocent child, falls out of favor. When his brothers try and carry out God’s orders, he tries to protect the unborn child and it’s mother along with the other people who have managed to survive the holocaust. It’s not really all that original, but like zombie movies, it doesn’t have to be.

Stewart started out in effects, and it looks as if he brought that expertise to the table here, doing what he can with what he has to work with. The fights, stunts, and make up look pretty good for the low budget the movie apparently has. There’s some CGI mixed in, but a lot of it is practical apparently.

Cinematography is so so. There are some really frightening scenes that make you sit up, like the toddler with a butcher’s knife, but there’s also a lot of MTV camera work here; slow motion gun fights ad nauseum. I guess it comes from Stewart’s work with John Woo. We all know how that man loves his slow mo. But he’s also worked on Iron Man and Sin City, which gives him some of his cred back.

The acting is good. Bettany seems to be moving from nancy boy drama acting to honest to goodness action hero. Surprisingly, it seems to suit him, and he’s good in almost anything really. I would rather see him as an action star than Vin Diesel. Quaid is Quaid really. He’s like Michael Keaton or Tom Cruise. It’s always the same guy, but you don’t really care enough to notice. That the whole cast keeps a straight face while delivering some of the most heavy handed dialogue I’ve heard in a while probably saved the film for me.

The last 20 minutes are what really tipped me over, though. When Durand comes down as Gabriel, decked out in black armor, black wings straight out of a Caravaggio painting, mace to shame the Witch-king of Angmar in hand… well that is the kind of stuff I geek out about. When he started using his wings as a weapon, spinning around and disembowelling people, I was cheering.

The fight was pretty short, which made me wish that they had focused more on the Gabriel/Michael relationship, rather than these boring human characters. In the end, that’s really what’s wrong with this film; it takes way too long to show you the real characters and then takes focus off of them. Sure there’s that weird Doug Jones Ice Cream Man and the Carnivorous Grandma, but I honestly couldn’t care less about the baby and the survivors. All I wanted was more great costumes, more wicked angel weapons, more wing fights. Bettany and Durand make for a pretty bromantic couple and a sequel with the two of them waging a proper War in Heaven would be very welcome.

Like most geek reviews, take this one with a grain of salt. If you’re one of those guys who watches stuff like Y tu mamá también for ANYTHING but the naked chicks, then you probably won’t like this movie. We aren’t talking Oscar material here. This thing was made for a particular niche audience that is as narrow as the one for furrie porn. If you belong to that niche market, or you’re the kind of movie goer who likes anything with guns and explosions, then you stand a good chance of enjoying yourself. It’s a fairly entertaining way to spend and hour and a half, but you’re not really going to miss anything if you wait for it on DVD.