Got to agree with you on that one Scope, it is a heck of a film, and has all sorts of suberb twists. Plus, I love Bruce Willis' name
Legion: A very solid 3/10... :(
I am extremely disheartened to see this film flop so spectacularly badly, I would have liked to have seen it prove quite the hit, as the premise (God sends angels to exterminate humanity, Angel Michael goes rogue, tries to stop it all etc) was quite good.
But it was predictable from the start. Furthermore, it fell happily into the niche of survival movie genres, and if you replaced the possessed with zombies, Angel Michael with Alice, and the Angel Gabriel with Nemesis, well, you'd have Resident Evil Apocalypse all over again. It just didn't deliver anything that hadn't been done before, bar a few very minor script alterations to make it the wrath of God, instead of the wrath of a plague/virus/etc.
The acting was also PDP (Pretty Damn Poor). Dennis Quaid was massively stereocast, playing the usual gruff arseholish character with the heart of gold and a trigger finger quicker than Neo. The rest of the supporting cast were also pretty shoddy, Lucas Black (of Tokyo Drift
fame) was oh so very dull, and the girl he had a crush on, Adrianne Palicki (yes, I don't have a bloody clue who she is either) who was bearing the son of God nonetheless, was a useless character, portrayed with little flair, and on a script that could have been used so much better (AKA I Don't Want The Responsibility syndrome). The ONLY redeeming character amongst the cast was Michael, played by Paul Bettany. He captured the whole 'silent warrior' thing very well, and could have truly made you believe he was angelic, due to his compassion, but also his hardiness. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of his 'evil' counterpart Gabriel. Frankly, if they had just given up the damn kid instead of prolonging the fight the movie might have been better, as Gabriel wouldn't have been in it. Dull, uninteresting and like every other bad guy the world has ever seen, except this one has bulletproof wings.
And he doesn't die. Yeah, I know, it's fantastic having a film where nobody wins. Gabriel can't die, Michael can, but doesn't, and humans galore die, and half of the supporting cast does so without you even knowing how, they're just written off in pathetic dialogue. And that is my major gripe with this film. Dialogue. Yes, we all know that every film needs someone talking (thus why they were originally called talkies). But at the end of the day, did you go to see an apocalyptic film of doom, only to be entered into a twenty minute relationship saga which at the end of the day resolves itself without so much as a blink, and the only people who could understand that happening are women. So yeah. For every 10 minutes of action that you get, you are laboured with at least double that in dialogue that makes no difference to the film at all. I could gripe about how other survival/horror/action films have too little dialogue, and too little character building. But for God's sake (literally), I now know more about Tyrese Gibson's gun-toting, but really emotionally deep and in-tune with white teenage girls' character, than I do about my Aunt Carol.
So I leave you with this question:
In a film featuring Paul Bettany (Master & Commander, A Knight's Tale, Iron Man, Firewall, The Da Vinci Code), Tyrese Gibson (2 Fast 2 Furious, Transformers 1 & 2, Death Race) and Dennis Quaid (Jaws 3, Battle for Terra, The Day After Tomorrow, Flight of the Pheonix, GI Joe)......
Where the bloody hell is the action?! Or did they not have enough action stars to really put any action in? As, for a post-apocalyptic action/horror film, it is sure lacking in apocalypse, and action. And horror. And pretty much anything else bar a reasonable performance by Bettany in what is an absolutely underwhelming film.
Oh, and beware this steaming turd of a film here:
Priest (2011). It has the same writer, the same director, the same lead (only bit I am happy about), and stars him bouncing off as a warrior priest to fight vampires in this "The post-apocalyptic horror thriller". *Repeatedly bashes head into desk in despair*