Will Smith stars as a man who appears to be the sole survivor of a viral outbreak that turned the human race into vampires. Now alone in New York City, he must concoct a cure before humanity becomes extinct. Great visuals lend new wrinkles to an old story, and Smith ensures the many slow moments remain emotionally compelling despite some lacklustre direction from Francis Lawrence.

Starring: Will Smith, Alice Braga, Dash Mihok.
Directed by Francis Lawrence.
Advisory: Frightening scenes, violence
Running time: 100 minutes
Rating: Three Stars out of five

We’ve seem Armageddon before, but nothing quite like this. A post-apocalyptic adventure that leaves all those massive, computer-generated scenes of falling buildings and devastation behind, I Am Legend doesn’t merely focus on the end of civilization -- it takes us on an existentialist quest to rediscover what it means to be human before our species expires.

Certainly, wholesale extinction of Homo sapiens was the last thing the people of Earth expected from a cure for cancer, but from what we can piece together in the opening frames of this Francis Lawrence (Constantine) action thriller, a tumour-erasing treatment has a nasty side-effect: It changes humans into flesh-eating vampires.

After three years of uncontrolled infections, every human being on the planet is either dead from the initial stages of infection, turned into a vampire, or eaten by the blood-sucking hordes who only come out at night -- except for one man.

When we meet Robert Neville (Will Smith), he’s screaming down the streets of Manhattan in a brand new red Mustang, carrying a high-powered assault weapon.

Again, it’s a familiar image in the Hollywood temple: Man in fast car carries big gun in a romantic attempt to rule the universe, but this time, it’s not just a symbol of pathetic yearning for control that can never be achieved. Robert Neville really is the last man on Earth with any chance of saving humanity from literal and figurative dismemberment.

Robert is smart. He’s in the military. He’s also an infectious diseases specialist, which means for the past three years while vampires have roamed the Earth, Robert has been hard at work in his basement laboratory concocting an array of anti-viral agents.

He hasn’t cooked up a cure yet, but every day he carries out a routine of combing the landscape for supplies, hunting deer with his dog Sam, and finding new test subjects to test his latest vial.

For the first half of the movie, that’s pretty much all we see -- which is the movie’s central strength, as well as its fundamental flaw.

On the upside, thanks to some seamless production design, we really do believe we’ve entered an alternate universe. Scenes of a deserted Times Square overgrown with wild grasses and chirping birds make an indelible impression, as does the image of tattered Christmas decorations blowing in a summer wind.

The idea of a derelict city is complete, and that gives I Am Legend an edge of Albert Camus as our lone, central hero attempts to reclaim the human race from disease and moral descent in absolute isolation.

On the downside, it’s not exactly heart-pumping, non-stop action.

There are long swaths of this movie that feel untethered and strangely incomplete because Lawrence’s narrative design is quite loose. The movie lacks a sense of intricacy and emotional detail, so that when those big moments arrive, we’re not experiencing them to their fullest.

It’s hard not to think of a movie such as Cast Away, which featured Tom Hanks as a man stuck on a deserted island. In that film, director Robert Zemeckis and Hanks ensured that every significant development felt huge. From starting a fire to drawing a face on Wilson the volleyball, we felt the desperate weight of one man searching for meaning in the void.
Lawrence lacks the finesse to bring us the same dimensions of loss and absence in I Am Legend.

But thanks to Smith -- probably the most empathetic actor on screen today -- we’re never disinterested in Robert Neville’s quest to “fix this and make everyone OK.”

Smith actually keeps the screen tension cranked by making us wonder if his character is even sane, but without a complex weave of scenarios to challenge his wits and carve out his character, the movie slackens at all the wrong spots.

Making things worse, Lawrence resorts to extended horror devices -- such as looking for a lost dog in a maze of dark hallways occupied by vampires -- in order to hold our attention.

It works, but it feels cheap and doesn’t really match the larger mood and look of the piece as a whole. I Am Legend, based on Richard Matheson’s novel, is a clever piece of science-fiction that questions our current lust for cure-alls and easy fixes to life’s larger problems.

It tells us that science could just as easily destroy us as it would save us, and the only thing that will keep us on the right track is a profound concern for human values and a willingness to sacrifice the one for the greater good.

It’s a beautiful message, but one that Lawrence lets slip through his fingers in the moment, forcing him to contrive a hackneyed finale that lives up to hero cliche. In this kind of movie, with huge empty spaces, Hollywood device begins to look grotesque because it’s so big -- when everything else, including the mysterious human essence, is rendered small.

A decent ride nonetheless, thanks in large part to Smith’s magnetic personality and his ability to find craft memorable moments from lumpy cinematic clay, I Am Legend may not live up to its title -- but it delivers an eerie, and visually rich adventure.

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