I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007)

I had to keep pinching myself as a reminder that I wasn't watching I, Robot again. Will Smith is effectively the same character, for all his lack of cyborg parts, and there's even an identically wrecked Brooklyn Bridge. Nevertheless, it could have been a lot worse. The first half of the film, where our hero wallows in the isolation of being the last man alive, is actually curiously affecting and engages far more than Charlton Heston's nihilist take in The Omega Man. But that soft centre also turns out to be the film's undoing: you start to feel we're headed for Christ-like martyrdom again and the scenario unravels in a progression of misapplied CGI. The mutants may be more feral than the earlier adaptation's daft pseudo-vampires, but the hammy creepiness of those shuffling neophytes was actually more chilling, with the cultish overtones recalling the irradiated bomb-worshippers of Beneath the Planet of the Apes. What we end up with here is saviour against beasties, as opposed to hedonist against lunatics. I know which is more psychologically involving.

5/10