Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

Well that was… interesting I suppose. So a couple of months ago I get this fancy new HD channel that shows all these HD trailers of upcoming movies with this movie ‘Legion’ being one of them. After watching the trailer I’m guessing the gist of the movie concerned God being tired of man, bringing the end of days upon man with only the angel Michael (Paul Bettany) rebelling against God’s will by basically shooting at the problem with a big gun. Over and over again. The as yet named chapter will be known as The Book of Rambo. Makes sense to me. I’m thinking after seeing the trailer, once we actually see the movie it must go a little deeper than that, but no, it is actually shallower than that. Eat lead Jehovah!

So the Good Lord is sick and tired of us and has sent His top dog Michael to ‘kill the child’. Sure we would like to think that God isn’t in the business of killing unborn babies but who am I to question His will. Take that Pro-Life! Michael totally isn’t down with this because he sees hope in us so he cuts off his wings, descends to earth, grabs some firearms and heads out to the desert to protect the child.

This unborn child belongs to a sleazy side road restaurant waitress named Charlie (Adrianne Palicki). Think the Virgin Mary if the Virgin Mary was a chain smoking whore. The diner is owned by Bob (Dennis Quaid) who finds life is consistently kicking him in the ass. Bob has an adult son who is borderline retarded named Jeep, at least that’s way Lucas Black plays Jeep, and Jeep loves the pregnant non-Virgin Mary whore, though she doesn’t love him back. Charles S. Dutton is here too as a kindly old Black man who I’m certain will sacrifice himself, as Charles S. Dutton tends to do in the horror movies I’ve seen him in. Tyrese Gibson shows up in the diner as well and I’m thinking he was going to be our man searching for redemption or something, but they went elsewhere with that initial plan. Rounding out our diner patrons are a yuppie couple and their bratty yet slutty teenage daughter who are impatiently waiting for Jeep to fix their broken down BMW. That’s not going to happen.

So if anybody’s seen the trailer they know already about the evil old lady climbing the walls and talking dirty. You may wonder however why did that happen? Well, God may hate us but apparently He loves the concept of our Zombie movies. So while we’re crumbling without direction down here it seems the Good Lord is up in Heaven watching ‘28 Days Later’ and ‘Dawn of the Dead’ and has had the epiphany that it would be cool to dispatch the angels of heaven to turn the populace into zombies who will eat us. While cursing at us. And dining on undercooked fly infested steaks. Dang God. But guess what? Michael has something for these angel / zombies and this something has fourteen in the clip and one in the hole and we’re about to watch some angel / zombies turn cold.

‘Legion’ is just plain retarded. I know it’s bad to use the word retarded and all but I can’t think of another word to better describe this thing. The best way to enjoy this ‘narrative’ as it were is to have absolutely no knowledge of anything having to do with The Bible and religion. Forget actually reading The Bible or going to church, I mean you’ve never even watched ‘The Ten Commandments’ or seen an episode of ‘Veggie Tales’. Angels possessing humans and turning them into zombies… yeah. The character of Percy laments in disbelief, saying that ‘The Angels are the Good Guys’. No Percy, they are not… they simply exist to execute the order of God, whatever those orders may be. Jump ahead to Michael trying to convince Gabriel (Kevin Durand) not to end the human disease and telling him ‘There is another way’. Hmmm… If I’m not mistaken, and I’m no theologian, but the last angel who defied God thinking he knew a better way went by the name of… oh, I don’t know… Lucifer? And where was Lucifer in this nonsense? You would think this kind of party would be right up his alley. And somebody might want to help this Lord to learn how to make a decision. Either you are gonna kill us or you are not. If all it took was some stupid human to jump on an angel’s back to prove to Him that I don’t want get eaten by a zombie then we could’ve done that a long time ago. And what’s up with the zombies anyway?

Throw out any rudimentary knowledge and then this movie might make a little bit of sense, but you would still have to deal with some seriously horrific dialog coming out the mouths of some very good actors, and more critically someone would still need to teach director Scott Stewart how to shoot and light an action scene. There was a lot of shooting and killing and dying in this movie but everything was so close and so hectic that it was hard to make out what exactly was going on. The worst of it was the big action filled Kung Fu showdown between Gabriel and Michael but it was so poorly lit and so hectic that only on the rare occasion when the camera wasn’t darting around the room could you make out who was kicking whose ass. But just to let you know that actor Kevin Durand was really cool in this movie as Gabriel, the best thing about this movie, and you gotta love his nifty Batman style utility belt of sweet weapons of death God blessed him with even though he still couldn’t finish the job.

From the trailer alone I expected ‘Legion’ to be plenty stupid and I thought I had allotted for this stupidity but I didn’t allot enough. What I didn’t expect was it to have all these poorly shot action scenes. God getting ideas on ending the human race by watching old George Romero movies on His TIVO I can deal with, bad action scenes I simply cannot excuse.