By Brendan Barnes, Staff Writer
What is the easiest way to aggravate and disappoint an anxious audience? Whet their appetites with a more than decent cast and a premise about God’s anger causing a potential apocalypse, and then put them through some of the most frustrating one hundred minutes imaginable. ‘Legion’ (2010), directed by Scott Stewart, details the fall of the archangel Michael, played by an infinitely serious Paul Bettany, and his struggle to protect what may be the unborn second-coming of Christ in a remote desert truck stop.
The film starts off well enough, with Bettany raiding a secret weapons depot for assault rifles and graphically suturing the wounds from his amputated wings. However, the film begins its steep decline immediately after this opening scene, which is less than five minutes long.
An unlikely situation involving a possessed elderly woman brings the rest of the cast, which surprisingly includes Dennis Quaid and Tyrese Gibson, together in the deserted diner. Paul Bettany arrives soon afterward, armory in tow, and reveals that Charlie the waitress, played by a decent Adrianne Palicki, is pregnant with Jesus.
Subsequently, wave after wave of possessed humans trying to kill the baby are repelled by the survivors in less than thrilling action scenes that are as tiresome as they are unoriginal. Bettany works as best he can with what he is given—which isn’t much— by Stewart’s script, but the predictable and unoriginal dialogue digs a hole that even an archangel cannot fly out of.
In what should have been the film’s climax, God sends Gabriel—because the possessed humans suffer from an unsurprising case of Stormtrooper Syndrome—to defeat Michael.
Accordingly, the film’s ultimate action scene is a dud, adding to an already intensely disappointing film.
The main problem with ‘Legion’ is a common flaw: Stewart tries to do too much and consequently barely accomplishes anything at all. The film is riddled with forgettable characters whose only purpose is to provide more blood splatter. The “action” scenes are so numerous that the original hope brought on Bettany’s opening scene gun raid is literally shot to pieces. And with some many actors whose mouths need dialogue, veterans like Bettany and Quaid barely get the chance to stand out because there are just too many characters to write for.
It would be easy to say that ‘Legion’ would have been better if it was stripped down, but the fact is that ‘Legion’ is already stripped down. At just 100 minutes, the film shoots by and, by the end, still feels empty. “Legion” ends with a voiceover nearly identical to the voiceover that begins the film, with Charlie observing that God “got tired of all the bull****.” Despite the confusion that the repeated voiceover creates—the movie does not come full circle at all— it does generate an interesting question: When will audiences get tired of dealing with the mediocrity that Hollywood, too often, pours out? Scott Stewart’s next film—‘Priest,’ which also stars Bettany—comes out in August, but don’t be surprised if it fails to gain more than its budget.