Legion – Angels Are Watching Over You… Sort Of

Article first published as Movie Review Legion – Angels Are Watching Over You…Sort Of on Blogcritics.

Legion (2010) is a horror flick with some pretensions. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, it generally ensures that you can forgive minor grains of sand that could otherwise be irritating. In a truck stop in the Mohave desert a mismatched group of people seem to be gathering by coincidence. There’s the reluctantly pregnant girl Charlie (Adrianne Palicki), Bob Hanson (Dennis Quaid) and his son Jeep (Lucas Black) who own the place, Kyle Williams (Tyrese Gibson) who only stops for directions and the use of a phone, Percy Walker (Charles S. Dutton) the short order cook and the Anderson family, Howard (Jon Tenney) and Sandra (Kate Walsh) and their slightly rebellious daughter Audrey (Willa Holland).

When the television stops working and the phones die any seasoned horror movie watcher knows that something bad is coming. The first sign of how bad the bad thing that’s coming really is becomes obvious when the little old lady Gladys (Jeanette Miller) comes though the door with her walker and proceeds to smile beneficently at the gathering before she suddenly takes a bite out of Howard’s neck and then scales the wall like an insect.
Seconds later the extremely soft spoken and together Michael (Paul Bettany) shows up in a stolen police car with an armoury in the trunk and proceeds to proclaim that the end is nigh. Literally.

It turns out that Charlie’s unborn child is the only hope of all of mankind and that Michael is there to make sure that the child survives. The bad things that are coming are sent by God himself to wipe humanity out, a sort of etch-a-sketch approach to what ails the world. The archangel has actually gone against orders and come to our aid. Wave after wave of people possessed by angels attack the diner and decimate the survivors within until finally Michael’s equal, Gabriel (Kevin Durand) comes to put an end to the disobedience. By then Charlie has had the baby, so the morality of the whole thing has changed.

There are many little moments in this movie that really shine. Most of them have Paul Bettany in them. He speaks so softly and so convincingly, and he kicks some righteous behind in a way I, for one, really enjoyed. I’ve not seen him do action like this before, but he certainly has the physical presence for it. Adrianne Palicki gives a very good performance as the big-bellied Charlie, still smoking when she’s nine months pregnant, which is upsetting enough to watch in and of itself. Lucas Black does a very good job of portraying the steadfast Jeep who is actually good enough in his own way that he has managed to help Michael retain his faith in mankind as a whole, and Dennis Quaid is really a spectacularly good down-on-his-luck loser with something like a heart of gold, even when he falls asleep on the job.

All that being said, there is grit in the stew here. The director Scott Charles Stewart started his career in special effect and you can tell. There is a certain emphasis on the effects side of things, a certain love for some of the bad guys, like The Ice Cream Man (Doug Jones), and explosions and weapons and spectacular fight scenes, not that I don’t enjoy that, I do. The problem is, some things feel much too familiar, like the final scene of the movie that any fan of The Terminator will instantly clock on to. You can call that a homage, if you like, it’s certainly too explicit to be incidental. There is also hints and allusions to other general lore, of course, but for some reason the end result is just not more than the sum total of its parts, which is unfortunate. There is a lot of exposition, which allows the actors to shine, each in their own little moment, but which does not add anything to the overall story. It feels disjointed in an odd, rambling way. It also feels like the director/script writer doesn’t trust the audience to believe the motivation driving the characters to act the way they do.

The problem is that too much explanation is just as bad as not enough. The pacing is awkward, to say the least. Building suspense is not an easy thing and you really have to keep your finger on the button to be able to create the kind of unease that the waiting between attacks needs to have in order for the viewer to feel unsettled. That never really works here.

There is also the fine line between horror and splatter, one inducing the kind of creeping dread that has you on the edge of your seat and the latter just making you go “eeew” and there are a few instances of that here too, where horror would have been preferable.

It’s not a bad first effort, but it feels squandered when it could have been so much more considering the cast and the general idea.

Legion (2010) directed by Scott Charles Stewart stars Paul Bettany (Michael), Lucas Black (Jeep Hanson), Tyrese Gibson (Kyle Williams), Adrianne Palicki (Charlie), Charles S. Dutton (Percy Walker), Jon Tenney (Howard Anderson), Kate Walsh (Sandra Anderson), Willa Holland (Audrey Anderson), Dennis Quaid (Bob Hanson), Kevin Durand (Gabriel), Doug Jones (Ice Cream Man) and Jeanette Miller (Gladys).

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Directed by Guillermo del Toro (2008) and starring Ron Perlman as Hellboy, Selma Blair as Liz and Doug Jones as Abe Sapien.
Okay. So. I have issues with the whole comic-turned-movie thing. I willingly admit it. It’s not just the fact that these movies have a tendency to get really silly… As you pretty much can expect from the idea of grown men putting their underwear on outside their stretchy tights. It’s more that they either do nothing with the characters or they don’t spend as dime on the script in order to blow their wad on the effects, or they don’t give a rat’s behind about the story in order to delve into the characterization of characters that have… uhm, very little depth.
So it’s surprisingly rare that you get a movie like this one that manages to do a good job of the visual as well as the story and use the characters in a clever way.
Hellboy is fantastic to say the least and it could have been blatantly cheesy and silly, but it somehow manages to tread that fine line and come out smelling like roses. Ron Perlman is all padded up, but he manages to carry the armour without becoming two dimensional and watching Hellboy and Abe get drunk on beer and sing Barry Manolow’s “Can’t smile without you” while musing on their respective love lives is just funny as all get out, seeing as how they manage to look about seventeen years old both of them.
The visuals are stunning. That’s really the only word for it. They’re right on the verge of heavy unreality the whole time, but somehow manage to seem credible as an alternate reality coexisting with ours. It’s less glossy than other similar alternative worlds I’ve seen, which is a bonus. There are a couple of things I personally could have done without, but I’m not going to gripe about that when the overall is so spectacular.
Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) is a surprisingly soft-spoken bad guy despite his sword wielding and actually comes off as someone with an agenda that isn’t as far fetched or foaming at the mouth as some villains. It makes the plot better that he has cause to be doing what he’s doing. His twin sister Princess Nuala (Anna Walton) gets caught in an impossible situation and again, this actually gives depth to the storyline.
This is all good fun in the best possible way. The bad guys are really good and the good guys are bad ass. It’s visually imaginative and down right pretty at times. Hellboy is funny and sarcastic and still just a guy, despite the skin tone and the filed down horns. There’s no dead time and you don’t find yourself looking at your watch or yawning.
As long as you take that Coleridgean leap of faith and submit to the willing suspension of disbelief you’ll have a good time.
You can’t really ask for more than that.

Mule