A watchable but impossibly silly timewaster, Scott Stewart’s Legion takes the old Night of the Living Dead/Assault on Precinct 13 (read: Rio Bravo) formula and adds a biblical twist. But it doesn’t work at all as horror, or religious thriller, or anything else really. It just sits there on the screen, fun in spots, lacking any kind of distinction.
This time around, the zombies are possessed humans who employ CGI to stretch out their jaws and limbs as they rage towards a group of disparate survivors holed in a Nevada highway diner. Invariably, they’re mowed down by machine gun fire from diner owner Bob Hanson (Dennis Quaid), his son Jeep (Lucas Black) – both sporting awful Texas (?) accents – and the others.
Including Michael (Paul Bettany), an angel sent down to Earth by God to wipe out humanity. That’s the twist here: God is the bad guy, the angels are his merchants of death, and the zombies are plague-stricken humans spreading the apocalypse. There’s a biblical-level thriller here, but in Legion, we’re confined to a middle-of-nowhere diner for 90% of the running time, with little idea of what has happened or is happening throughout the rest of the world.
Why is God so angry? The movie is less than clear on this point, only offering up (twice, no less) the narration that “one day, God got tired of all the bullshit.” Indeed. So he wipes out the human race, apparently, except the small group in a desolate diner.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, they just happen to hold the key to mankind’s survival in the form of pregnant Charlie (Adrianne Palicki), who will give birth to some kind of vague Christ-like figure at any moment. 90 minutes into the movie, they’re just starting to dive into bible instructions and three wise men, or prophets, or some such bullshit, which comes long past the point of anyone caring.
Michael the angel was sent down to kill Charlie before her child is born, but he changes his mind and disobeys God’s orders somewhere along the way. He cuts off his wings, packs out an L.A. police cruiser with semi-automatic weapons, and drives out to the Nevada diner for a good ol’ fashioned zombie gunfight. We’re talking God and angels here, but I guess this is the level they operate at in a cheesy B-movie.
Saving grace: Kevin Durand, as angel Gabriel, who shows up to carry out Michael’s failed mission. Gabriel is clad in decadent Roman-era armor and giant wings, carries a mechanical metal mace, and is always lit from behind: he’s the only traditionally biblical figure in the film, completely out of place, and there’s a weird homosexual vibe between him and Michael. But his scenes are fully entertaining in that lovable bad-movie kind of way.
During much of Legion, I got the sense that they weren’t even trying to come up with something sensible. The tone is all off, stranded somewhere in half-seriousness despite the ridiculous nature of the plot; most audiences will laugh this one off the screen, as opposed to the similar Feast, which laughs at itself along with us.
The director was Scott Stewart, a visual effects whiz who has churned out a poorly lit, visually inconsistent mess here full of half-formed ideas that seem to pander to genre fans. It doesn’t make for a good movie, but it can be fun if you’re in the right frame of mind.
