Rush hour is a lot easier to beat when its just you and your dog.

Director: Francis Lawrence

If you’re going to make a movie that involves the viewer watching one person, alone with just a dog, for well over an hour, you’d better be sure that the person you recruit to play that role can actually hold the viewer’s interest for that time. Factor in, for Hollywood, that the person you pick needs to be capable of getting big box-office, and you ain’t got a lot of choices. But casting Will Smith in this was a choice the studio largely got right.

The year is 2012 and the world has ended. Robert Neville (Will Smith) is a military virologist, the last surviving human in New York. A miracle cure for cancer went disastrously wrong three years before and killed 94% of the world’s population, mutated 5% into feral “darkseekers” who attack anything living at night, leaving just 1% of the world’s population immune. Neville lives alone in New York, with only his deceased daughter’s dog for company, and works to find a cure for the disease by capturing and experimenting on the darkseekers.

In a remarkably brave and unusual move for a blockbuster, Will Smith is essentially alone on screen for a solid hour. The film takes a measured, well-paced delight in following his daily routines, covering everything from his work in immunology to scavenging for supplies, hunting deer (escaped from the zoo), hitting golf balls off aircraft carriers, and having free run of a video store he has filled with mannequins. His Washington Square house is heavily fortified, but also remarkably homely and certainly not that bad a place to watch the end of the world from.

Following this daily routine is, by far and away, the most interesting part of the film, as it is one of the few parts that actually feels unique and original. In fact, you wish it could go on longer and that the film didn’t need to revert back its more predictable “one man against the monsters” theme. The ingenuity of survival in extreme circumstances, and the eerie freedom of the busiest city in the world completely empty, makes you wonder not only “could I do that” but also, secretly “would it be fun for a while to drive a fast car around Times Square or whack golf balls off the wing of a stealth bomber?”.

“For a while” is the key thing here, as the film also explores the deeply damaging effect extreme isolation has had on Neville’s psychology. It’s here that Smith earns his chops. He’s an extremely engaging actor, so you’re happy to spend time with him, but he’s also skilled enough to play a cracked psyche without going overboard. Neville chats (and flirts) with mannequins, knows Shrek so well he can speak in perfect unison (inflections and all) with the film, and keeps up a regular stream of conversation with his dog Sam, including asking her what she is planning to do for his birthday. Much of this is played lightly, but at key moments Smith allows Neville to snap. He also plays the tragedy gently – his reactions to Sam’s death are genuinely quite moving because they are quiet and restrained.

This is all interesting stuff. Less interesting are the “darkseekers” and the film’s final resolution. Firstly, the darkseekers themselves are bog-standard zombie monsters – screaming, running, deadly creatures with their one quirk being their fear of UV light. Other than that, it’s nothing you haven’t seen in half a dozen movies before (better). Turning them into zombie creatures does make Neville even more isolated but makes encounters with them fairly predictable, mostly inspired by films past. Most of the film’s big confrontation set pieces have a slightly tired familiar feeling to them. I’m already struggling to remember them, and I only saw the film two days ago.

The major problem with this film is its ending. I Am Legend had its ending re-shot after test audiences saw it. Originally, a reveal would have been that the darkseekers were far more intelligent than appeared, and their motivation was to prevent Neville’s experimentation on them. Two scenes still make a point of discussing Neville’s Mengele-like wall of photos of dead darkseekers, killed by his cure experiments, and other hints remain through the film: the traps they set , the presence of an “Alpha” leader among the monsters, repeated shots of the tattoo on Neville’s last captured darkseeker, which was intended to be a crucial clue that she was the mate of the Alpha.

But test audiences weren’t having that. So in the final version, all this build-up and suggestion is shoved aside as Neville grabs a grenade and blows himself and them to hell to allow a cure to be taken to the rest of mankind. As the cure is taken to an idyllic community in the country (church and all) mankind’s future is his “legend” or some such guff. It’s a major loss of nerve that makes the film just another run-of-the-mill monster flick. It doesn’t match with hints that remain in the whole film and it doesn’t tie in with the more successful first hour of the film. It doesn’t question the possible rights and wrongs of Neville’s actions (at best comprehensive animal experimentation), but fully endorses them.

It’s a shame as this has ideas, its vistas of New York being reclaimed by nature are interesting and memorable, and Will Smith is pretty good in a straight acting role. But instead it settles for being a schlocky monster pic, where we can unquestioningly cheer as everything is neatly tied up with a bow and everything we thought about all of its characters is confirmed. As such, this film isn’t a classic and it hasn’t had the sort of life it might have been able to have. Despite good moments, it’s definitely not a Legend.