It’s hard to imagine someone better prepared to survive the apocalypse than Smith’s Neville. From his shabby-chic apartment in Washington Square, Neville (Will Smith) fends off plague mutants who seem a lot like the infected in 28 Days Later, only with CGI used to make them scary instead of hyperactive camera work. They also relocate the story from the ’burbs - where you might know your neighbors - to midtown Manhattan, where we can get a hundred-million-dollar view of the devastation left by a pandemic. They transform Neville’s shambling undead neighbors into super-fast albino mutants, turned rabid by a virus that was supposed to cure cancer but instead wiped out most of humanity. Matheson doesn’t apologize for reviving a hokey old monster: As he puts it neatly, “Before science caught up with the legend, the legend had swallowed science and everything.” But scriptwriters Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman seem embarrassed by this conceit. An infection, to which only Neville seems immune, has transformed humanity into garlic-hating, sun-shunning blood drinkers. The protagonist, Robert Neville, barricades himself at home because he doesn’t get along with the neighbors - and why should he? They circle his house at night, howling for his blood. Like the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend is a parable of atomic-age paranoia.

It’s two movies in one, and only one of them is worth watching.

The last third, where the filmmakers do their best to give this story a bit of that warm and fuzzy holiday spirit, stinks of script doctors, reshoots and desperation. The first two thirds of I Am Legend are genuinely exciting, but also unremittingly bleak. How does Hollywood take a twisted little tale about the end of humanity and turn it into a big-budget, ripped-Will-Smith-starring holiday thrill ride? Answer: not very well.

I am legend i am the monster