Sunday 10 April 2011

Dvd catch up: Legion. Angels kicking ass!



Not to be confused with Priest coming out soon, Legion was the first Paul Bettany CGI fest unleashed on an unsuspecting audience, not quite recovered from his turn as an albino killer in The Da Vinci Code.

The premise was intriguing: God, having lost faith in humanity, orders a legion of angels to unleash the Armageddon on earth. The film takes place nearly entirely in an out of town dinner, which becomes the last bastion of humanity, and where the survivors are helped by Angel Michael, who disagrees with God's plan.

John had just been told Paul Bettany's new film was out

The whole angels as villains and biblical apocalypse imagery has been a popular theme in a few video games and comic books of late, so it was only a matter of time before cinema tackled it. And the film starts off really well, wasting no time in setting up the action, and opening with a couple of incredibly nasty yet and OTT scenes (possessed grannies with a shotgun crawling on the ceiling anybody?), and setting up a suitably creepy and apocalyptic atmosphere.

I said I wanted my coffee, BLACK!

Sadly it all goes downhill from here. Rather than the scenes of angels kicking each other ass, which come near the end (by which time it's too little too soon), the film rehashes the whole survivors trapped in an isolated place and hunted by an hostile force (Night of the living dead, Demons...), and more disappointingly, have them spend most of the film fighting some nondescript, possessed humans, who ressemble any infected from any other films of the genre, from 28 days later to The crazies remake. 

There is very little action, and little atmosphere, and despite a final showdown between two angels, you cannot help think how much more fun this should have been if it had made the most of its themes and imagery.




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