The truck stop is owned by Bob (Dennis Quaid) and Jeep (Lucas Black) Hanson. Jeep is in love with Charlie even though the baby isn’t his and Charlie doesn’t seem to particularly have any sort of feelings for him. How Charlie came to work for the Hansons is never fully explored. Jeep keeps having nightmares about angels and the end of the world and Charlie and the baby. Cut to Los Angeles. The archangel Michael (Paul Bettany) lands on Earth and promptly cuts off his wings, essentially casting off his angelic self. See, Michael was given an order by God to take up his flaming sword of vengeance and smite the human race. Michael, however, loves the humans and still has faith in humanity so he ignores the order and sets about preparing himself to square off against God and Heaven. How does he do this? By raiding a toy store and picking up a ton of assault rifles and rocket launchers (?!). After an altercation with some cops in which one of the po-pos turns into an angel and is killed, Michael takes their car and drives off. Cut back to the New Mexico diner. In attendance are of course Charlie, Jeep, and Bob. We also meet Percy (Charles S. Dutton {ROC!!!!}) the diner’s one-armed cook. The Anderson family, husband Howard (Jon Tenney), wife Sandra (Kate Walsh), and slutty teen daughter Audrey (Willa Holland), a rich, somewhat snooty family waiting for their broke down BMW to get fixed. They are soon joined by Kyle (Tyrese Gibson) who gets lost on his way to a custody hearing for his child; Kyle is a gangsta-but-not-really-a-gangsta in that he carries a .45 automatic but never actually shot it before, just waved it around to frightin’ off dem trippan foos, yo! (again !?). An old woman named Gladys (Jeanette Miller) shows up for a bite to eat. She seems very nice, just a kindly old woman passing through. She is quite the Chatty Cathy and takes an interest in Charlie’s pregnancy. When Charlie admits that she is not married, the woman goes off on a fire-&-brimestone rant about how the baby, and everyone else for that matter, are going to burn in hell. She then grows shark teeth, black eyes, and the agility of Spiderman. After sinking her teeth into Howard’s neck and ripping a McNugget sized chunk out, she leaps around, crawls up the walls, and basically goes apeshit. A frying pan to the head does nothing but piss her off, but a couple of .45 slug in her back drop her pretty easily. Just as everyone is freaking out, Michael shows up. After showing them all that he has normal teeth and not shark teeth, they accept that he’s a good guy at face value even though he’s got blood stains, is not dressed as a cop even though he’s driving an LAPD car, and the car is all beat up. He never actually explains anything, just starts passes out assault rifles and sub-machine guns and tells them to shoot anyone that comes up to the diner because they’re angels intent on getting Charlie before she has her baby. See, Charlie’s baby is the chosen one, the one who will grow up and lead humanity back into God’s favor. Why Charlie is chosen for this is never explained, and seeing as how she’s not religious, smoked like a chimney (while pregnant, mind you), and doesn’t even want the baby to the point that she has on numerous occasion thought about abortion, I don’t think she would have been my top pick to carry the next Son of God to term. Anywho, the rest of the movie is the unlikely heroes protecting Charlie and the baby from the legion of angel-possessed people trying to kill them. I don’t really feel like capping anything else, so I’ll just mention that the angel Gabriel shows up and has an angelic no holds barred match against Michael (when Michael ignored the order to slaughter humanity, the job was delegated to Gabriel who has no qualms whatsoever about stomping angelic mudholes in humanity’s collective assholes. I will say that Legion was a decent movie, okay but not great. It had a lot going for it, but it also had a lot of things wrong. It had way too many WTF moments, moments that as you watch it you say to yourself “yeah, right!” For instance, there is a literal army of angel-possessed people surrounding the diner and Michael and the others are on the roof blasting away with their guns as if they had entered in a god-mode unlimited ammo cheat. The ground is covered in spent shells (quite an annoying cliché in its own right) and they just keep plugging away without once ever pausing to change magazines. Michael walked into the diner with two duffle bags and yet they have enough weapons AND ammo to supply a small South Asian army. Then there are the angel-possessed people; why exactly do the angels need to possess humans to do their job? It’s never explained. They can drive cars, but they aren’t clever enough to grab guns of their own or lob a stick of dynamite into the diner? They basically drive to the diner and shuffle about outside like Romero zombies. Way too much time is spent on character development with the various occupants of the diner telling their life story and what events caused them to be at the diner in the first place; this is unnecessary and really drags down the pace of film. Making matters worse, very, very little is explained about the apocalypse other than the fact that God’s pissed off. Hell, Michael doesn’t explain anything to the people in the diner (or us) for hours; it is light when he arrives and it isn’t until it’s dark and after three shootouts that someone finally says “Okay, tell us what the hell is going on!” And lot of little, and more than a handful of big, things like this really make it difficult to suspend disbelief. And not being able to suspend your disbelief really sucks a ton of enjoyment out of a movie. It was also completely predictable and knew who was going to live, who was going to die, and how it was going to end pretty much in the 1st quarter. There are, however, several good points. The script, for what it is, is decently written. While somewhat campy and clichéd there are moments when I chuckled at the tension-breaking jokes. It was also extremely well acted, and everyone did an excellent job with what they had been given. In fact, it was much better acted than it had any right to be. The action, while silly at times, was quite entertaining. It also had a lot of nice touches. The angelic armor Michael and Gabriel wore was very cool, as were their fight scenes. God was never shown, only alluded to which was nice. Both Michael and Gabriel wore collars signifying their loyalty to God; Michael’s collar fell off after he cut off his wings. Of course, the coolest thing was the inclusion of Gabriel’s trumpet announcing his arrival; the sound was frightful and just the fact that they included Gabriel’s trumpet was awesome. In the end, I put the blame of the movie’s issues with the direction. I’m not sure if this was Scott Stewart’s first directing gig, but it sure felt like it. Legion from start to finish really felt clumsy and forced, as if Stewart knew what he want to say but didn’t know how to say it. It was as if everything was filler was the action sequences. I think in the hands of a better, more experienced director or even if Stewart had made it after fine tuning his directing skills with other projects Legion would have been a much better quality movie. Legion is an okay movie but I have absolutely no desire to see it again. I recommend it as a curiosity to fans of the religious thriller/holy apocalypse genre and those who like a lot of rat-tat-tat-tat-tat action. What we really need is a kick-ass Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse movie. A VERY liberal 3 Nokies. |
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| MediaPlay |
| Legion When the last angel falls, the fight for mankind begins |
Religious thriller films are a tricky beast to conquer, in my eyes at least. Some pull it off quite well, The Prophecy with Christopher Walkin for instance, and some… well, don’t, such as The 9th Gate. I have to admit that I really enjoy good religious thrillers/apocalypse movies, the whole Heaven’s war thing really interests me. It stems, I suppose, from both my Catholic upbringing and my intrigue into the supernatural as well as my love for history. Put all that into a story about the end of the world and it makes for an entertaining flick…usually. As I said, this types of movies are tricky. Legion is a story about how God loses faith in humanity because of all the murder, rape, blasphemy, wars, heathens, basically, as the film so eloquently states, all the bullshit. Thus God decides to eradicate all of humanity not unlike the story of Noah’s ark when he sent a massive flood to destroy all humans except Noah’s family and two of every animal. However, in this case he doesn’t flood us out like gophers, he sends an army of angels to slaughter us. Well, angels that take possession of humans at any rate. And unlike Noah, who God spared, it doesn’t seem like anyone is good enough to start our population over again. The movie starts off with a voiceover from Charlie (played by Adrianne Palicki) about her mother telling her how God loves his children and so forth but that after her father leaves her mother changes her tune and tells her about some prophecy that says how God is fed up with all the bullshit (how her mother came across this prophecy is never explored {you’ll soon notice a trend}). Charlie is pregnant and working at some dump of a diner in the middle of the New Mexico desert. |
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| 01/26/10 |