  Lewis Jacobs-Paul Bettany stars in Screen Gems' supernatural action thriller Legion. |
The angels-as-bad-guys motif has had some pop cultural steam lately, mainly via the TV series Supernatural, where the winged guys are currently pushing Armageddon like the Bush administration pushed Iraq.
And who knows, maybe it’s in the Book of Revelation that the day would come when lambs lie down with lions and TV would have to be dumbed-down for the movies.
Say hello to Legion, a movie for people who think Supernatural uses too many spells and not enough good old-fashioned high-powered automatic weaponry.
Seriously, I think if they were doing The Exorcist today, they’d just pop a cap in the demon’s a-- and be done with it.
It’s also the year’s early contender for the “everything you need to see is in the trailer” award. (Koff — creepy old lady who crawls on the ceiling — koff).
A movie by a neophyte director who made his rep doing visual FX for Die Hard and Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Legion is the Apocalypse without all that Biblical stuff. The depth of its context comes with a short bit of opening narration by its heroine Charlie (Adrianne Palicki) that is repeated at the end of the movie. Charlie recalls asking her final-days-minded mother, “Why is God so mad at his children?
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe he just got tired of all the bulls---.”
On the basis of that, I believe God is really, really angry, and believers should avoid Legion, lest they be smited (smote?).
Legion opens up lifting from Stephen King’s The Mist (and ends stealing from The Terminator). A slumming Dennis Quaid and Charles F. Dutton play co-proprietors of a dusty desert diner in the improbably-named Paradise Falls — with Quaid’s son, Jeep (Lucas Black), acting as mechanic and protector to the pregnant waitress Charlie. On this day, the usual clientele of “no one” has been buttressed by a yuppie couple and their troubled teenaged daughter, whose BMW has broken down and a gun-carrying maybe-gangsta (Tyrese Gibson) who’s lost.
And oh yeah, there’s the angel Michael (Paul Bettany, also slumming), who shows up with a stolen police car full of automatic weapons and ammo, and the news that Charlie’s unborn baby holds the key to mankind’s salvation.
But enough talk! Let’s all get up on the roof of the diner and start blowing the crap out of the army of angel-possessed people who show up in their cars out of a cloud of flies. The ice-cream man who morphs into a spider, the evil kid (there’s always an evil kid), and yeah, the old lady. Just a thought, but if you’re God and you’re sending people possessed by angels to flush out a handful of heavily-armed people from a diner, why not possess a real army with tanks, or a jet pilot who could just drop some ordnance on the place?
But where many a movie falls into a vat of cheese is when it tries to show us “the other side.” The angels’ barracks turn out to look like the loft of an industrial-sized stable. We only ever get to meet two of God’s Cops — Michael and Gabriel (Kevin Durand) — but there is a quick scene of hundreds of them flying in formation, looking for all the world like the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz.
jim.slotek@sunmedia.ca
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