March 2010
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Legion (15)
Posted 10th March 2010

An angelic ode to The Terminator, Legion reinvents Cameron’s cyborg story by wholesale stealing his plot of an unprepared expecting waitress who must be protected by a bad-ass but out-gunned stoic hero from a threat that can’t be bargained with, can’t be reasoned with, doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear and absolutely will not stop, ever, until and she is dead so that her unborn “saviour of mankind” son can be born to lead us out of darkness and just applying it to a God-induced apocalypse instead of the former robots from the future.

If the plot of Scott Stewart’s debut feature is Terminator-lite, then the actual majority of the film’s machinations will also feel strangely familiar from your atypical zombie siege staples, Legion pitched somewhere between classic Romero and John Carpenter’s seminal Assault on Precinct 13. Not that this familiarity is necessarily a bad thing, its clear Stewart wants to homage his favourite films in one handy-to-watch entertaining genre package.

Which this undoubtedly is. Not that current widespread opinion seems to reflect that. I’m not going to bleat on about how others “are missing the point” though because, frankly, I can understand why many people have been left disappointed: Legion was entirely misrepresented in its trailer as an epic, mythic battle of the heavens with angels replacing (Flash Gordon) hawkmen in an airborne battle royale.

This definitely isn’t that because there really is no angel-on-angel action at all except for one nifty little Bride vs. Elle-esque interior tumble between Archangels Gabriel (rent-a-bad guy Kevin Durand) and Michael towards the films climax. That cool flying stuff in the trailer: yeah that is pretty much it. Budgetary restrictions? Probably. It’s a shame and obviously would have meant a much bigger scoped picture had it been included but, that being said, the Spielberg and M. Night Spellcheckman-esque choice to ignore the wider apocalypicture to instead concentrate on the gun-centric action at the centre of the chaos is well-handled as Michael and his disciples mow down wave-after-wave of zombie-like humans, weird stretchy-men and psychotic Drag Me to Hell-type grannies (in the best scene of the film) from their Paradise Falls diner haven.

Holding this homage together is a monotone, two-gun toting Paul Bettany, his performance the absolute, iconic, cool-as-ice shit as renegade fallen Michael-without-wings on a mission where nothing else matters except for the safety of Charlie (Friday Night Light’s Adrianne Palicki) and her unborn. Pitched perfectly, it’s the sort of role you could have imagined they might have been in interested in Keanu Reeves for before “serious” actor Bettany pulled a Nic Cage and discovered his inner action hero.

Super stylish and showing great promise for future more generously-budgeted productions, there’s enough strength of evidence in Legion for me personally to suggest that if Sam Mendes can’t get it together anytime soon for the Preacher funny book adap (that I’m a massive fan and collector of) then how about giving Stewart a fair shot at it? Bettany for Cassidy as well anyone?

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