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MEN IN BLACK (to my mind a pretty strong film on its own terms) benefits hugely from Smith's presence - it's a real star turn. It's a fun premise, visually witty, brief (something Hollywood could pay more attention to), chockablock with interesting character actors, and Smith presides over it all - charming, committed to the premise and special effects, and obviously riffing on the actors around him and the material itself. It's an ingratiating performance, but it's entirely appropriate to the tone of the project. I'd go so far as to say that he has an indelible impact on that tone, and the movie flat-out might not have worked with another actor.

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Fitzgerald Fortune wrote:

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MEN IN BLACK (to my mind a pretty strong film on its own terms) benefits hugely from Smith's presence - it's a real star turn. It's a fun premise, visually witty, brief (something Hollywood could pay more attention to), chockablock with interesting character actors, and Smith presides over it all - charming, committed to the premise and special effects, and obviously riffing on the actors around him and the material itself. It's an ingratiating performance, but it's entirely appropriate to the tone of the project. I'd go so far as to say that he has an indelible impact on that tone, and the movie flat-out might not have worked with another actor.

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I like Smith in interviews, but I find him hard to take on the big screen: he seems like a very nice chap, and he's pretty charismatic, but I don't like that ingratiating tone that shines through in his performances in films like MEN IN BLACK. (I agree that his performance fits the film like a glove, but I'm not fond of MEN IN BLACK at all.)

That said, I thought Smith was pretty good in I AM LEGEND: he managed to convincingly portray a man who is emotionally fragile. I gained new respect for him following his big scene with the dog Sam.

What bothered me about I AM LEGEND was the ending, which is almost antithetical to the major theme within Matheson's novel; I was surprised by the closing sequence, as throughout the film there seemed to be hints that the filmmakers were going to stick with the ending of the book. (For example, the use of the question 'Robert Neville: Savior?' on the cover of the copy of TIME that's pinned to Neville's fridge, and the moment in which Anna sees the polaroids of Neville's prior 'victims'.) Thus it was a disappointment that the closing sequence of the film

Spoilers

depicts Neville as a self-sacrificing hero, rather than a reluctant martyr. For all its faults, to my mind THE OMEGA MAN handles this theme pretty successfully.

End Spoilers

Additionally, I thought it was a bad move to make the pre-apocalypse Neville into a super-scientist, super-soldier tabloid celebrity: in Matheson's book, the point of the character is that he is an 'everyman', the type of character that Will Smith seems to have become associated with, and the type of character that--one would assume--audiences identify with. (This is integral to most of Matheson's work, and THE LAST MAN ON EARTH manages to capture this aspect of the character of Neville very well, thanks to Price's performance.)

Spoilers

By making Neville into some sort of heroic, self-sacrificing media celebrity, the movie seems to be reinforcing the predominantly negative culture of aspiration and celebrity--which is precisely the kind of culture that Matheson would have satirised, and which Romero satirised very well in LAND OF THE DEAD. In fact, I would say that LAND OF THE DEAD is probably thematically closer to Matheson's novel than this film.

End Spoilers

That said, I enjoyed I AM LEGEND much more than most of the Hollywood pictures that I've seen recently, and most of this was down to Smith's performance. However, the CGI Darkseekers were terrible, I thought: they kept reminding me of a shaved Sonic the Hedgehog. They certainly pale in comparison with the representation of the 'infected' in 28 WEEKS LATER: in my view, the latter portions of the movie would have been strengthened if the Darkseekers had been played by actors, rather than polygons.

Cheers,
Paul

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Fitzgerald Fortune wrote:

Yes, it's a reasonable film that fails to pull together its different strands into a satisfying whole. The fact that the film was given a green light without the presence of a completed script speaks volumes, I think.

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Fitzgerald Fortune wrote:
Smith is surprisingly good, though, and it's easily the best film that I've seen him in: it's a good country mile better than the awful and manipulative I, ROBOT. (That said, I've stayed away from his middlebrow pics such as THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.)

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Fitzgerald Fortune wrote:
That moment in which Smith follows Sam into the building whose entrance is situated under the el-train was probably the best sequence in the film: even the dreadful CGI Darkseekers looked good in that sequence, probably because they were mostly kept in shadow.

Lawrence has said that the film was started with the intention of using actors and stunt-men as the Darkseekers, but claimed that this caused too many problems. That sounds a bit like a cop-out response to a legitimate criticism, in my view: there was no need to use computer-generated creatures as all of the stunts could be easily achieved via other means.

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Fitzgerald Fortune wrote:
There were some fairly extensive reshoots too, I've heard. (I've been told that at a Japanese press conference, Will Smith supposedly revealed the ending, and as a consequence portions of the film were reshot; so there may be another ending sitting somewhere in the vaults of Warner Bros, waiting for the film's DVD release.)

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Edge44 wrote:

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Fitzgerald Fortune wrote:

Yes, it's a reasonable film that fails to pull together its different strands into a satisfying whole. The fact that the film was given a green light without the presence of a completed script speaks volumes, I think.

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I didn't know that it had the greenlight without a complete script. You would think that even the most inexperienced of producers would have sensed trouble looming.

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Fitzgerald Fortune wrote:

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Edge44 wrote:

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Fitzgerald Fortune wrote:

Yes, it's a reasonable film that fails to pull together its different strands into a satisfying whole. The fact that the film was given a green light without the presence of a completed script speaks volumes, I think.

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I didn't know that it had the greenlight without a complete script. You would think that even the most inexperienced of producers would have sensed trouble looming.

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I suspect that in modern Hollywoodland, that kind of thing goes on more frequently than we imagine: it has been said that producers only care about the 'name' talent involved (i.e. the stars, or a bankable director such as Michael Bay) and the marketability of the 'concept' ('It's JAWS meets MEET THE FEEBLES'). Apparently, sometimes the poster art takes precedence over the script, and is put together before the script is written. I've heard it said that those Orange ads are pretty spot-on in terms of their representation of the interests of financiers and producers.

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