Film Critics Review

I am legend critic’s reviews:

NY DAILY NEWS-

Will Smith does the honours in the new, improved version, demonstrating his charismatic presence in a film that rests almost solely on his shoulders. The only other humans we see, other than his family in flashbacks of the evacuation, are a mother (Alice Braga) and her son (Charlie Tahan) who've driven up from Maryland with god as their co-pilot.

Smith has a tough task, making himself interesting while relating only to his dog and to mannequins that his lonely, paranoid mind takes for real friends. But he and those street magicians who dressed Manhattan pull it off.

ROGEREBERT-

The opening scenes of "I Am Legend" have special effects so good that they just about compensate for some later special effects that are dicey

"I Am Legend" does contain memorable scenes, as when the island is being evacuated, and when Neville says goodbye to his wife and daughter (Salli Richardson and Willow Smith), and when he confides in his dog (who is not computer-generated, most of the time, anyway). And if it is true that mankind has 100 years to live before we destroy our planet, it provides an enlightening vision of how Manhattan will look when it lives on without us. The movie works well while it's running, although it raises questions that later only mutate in our minds.

TELEGRAPH-

The first hour of the film, by far its strongest, plays like a cross between an urban version of Robinson Crusoe and One Man and His Dog. Smith, in a performance of stamina and subtlety that recalls that of Tom Hanks in Cast Away (2000), wanders around an island that has become a wilderness.

What started out so promisingly, a companion piece of sorts to Children of Men, disappears in a frenzy of screaming, head-banging, bloodiness - followed by totally unconvincing redemption.

CONTENT TIME

It's in the last half-hour that I Am Legend imports new elements that both propel the story to its explosive climax and just aren't as compelling as the day-in-the-life story that preceded it. The notion the movie floats, of an uninfected colony north of the city, is literally too Utopian to seem either plausible or attractive to a hardened case like Neville. Smith has inhabited the character so fully, and let moviegoers inside with him.