[Movies] Legion (2010)

Welcome to the Holy Week! So I guess it seems almost fitting to try and review items with remote religious connection just for the heck of it. Call it a weird geek thing despite my being agnostic.

However this is hardly a great example of religious concepts being used as the basis for a movie concept. Despite the raw potential of angels, demons and all that good stuff coming together for a big battle royale or something, it doesn't always work out for the best. A movie isn't just the sum of the individual elements that go into it. It takes a skilled hand to take the various elements together and craft them into an effect storytelling.

But again, this is not a good example. Oh well.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Legion is an unconventional tale about the Archangel Michael (Paul Bettany) falling to Earth after a significant disagreement with the Divine. He quickly arms himself with enough weapons to take on the Terminators featured in the first 3 movies in that franchise and perhaps a little extra.

The story eventually shifts to a lone diner pretty much in the middle of nowhere. As expected, this little diner is doomed to become the center of a coming conflict between the forces of the Divine and this ragtag band of humans (plus a fallen angel). God has lost faith in humanity andf has dispatched his angels to destroy all creation and Michael felt this was wrong. Now they're converging on the diner since the waitress Charlie (Adrianne Palicki) is pregnant and her baby will play a key role somehow.

The movie plays like a mix between the likes of Constantine and a zombie survival horror movie. This concept might have worked if the story had been a lot more interesting and the whole movie better executed. Instead, we spend most of the pretty much confused about what's going on and a bit at a loss for words as to where things are headed. The synopsis I have presented above might be considered to be somewhat spoiler-y given how the writers decided to handle the story, but then not knowing about the whole God angle was sort of key to understanding what the movie is about.

In fact, my partner and I found ourselves already losing interest about 15 minutes into the movie. Things only remotely begin to pick up once they have their first encounter with the supernatural enemy. There were also some token locusts but I'm not sure what purpose they were meant to serve, really.

Oh, and Dennis Quaid was in the movie as the owner of the diner, but he doesn't really get to contribute all that much. It's worse off for his son in the film, Jeep (Lucas Black), who really doens't do much and yet he just sort of lingers around there.

If you're looking for a movie for this Holy Week that can double as penance for your sins, then this is one for you to suffer through. Really.

Legion gets 1 high-powered mace with spinning blades out of a possible 5.