Legion

Legion is one of the worst things ever created by human hands in any field of endeavor through all recorded history. No, it's not "so bad it's good." Anyone who knows me knows I respect "so bad it's good." Dungeons & Dragons is one of my favorite movies. Legion is just inert and boring; a supernatural horror thriller where they forgot to add in the horror or the thriller, leaving just a supernatural. It's worse than reality TV. It's a shame it didn't come out a few months earlier because it would have found a proud home on my bottom 100 movies of the decade list.

In The Terminator Legion, the world is on the cusp of apocalypse at the hands of Skynet God that will leave humanity broken and scattered. But there's one last hope: an ordinary waitress is pregnant with the child that is fated to grow up to lead what's left of humanity in victorious rebellion against the robots the angels and save the world. Upon hearing of this, Skynet God sends the T-800 the archangel Gabriel from the future heaven to find her and kill her, while Kyle Reese the archangel Michael departs from the same place to protect her. Action scenes ensue.

There's a certain novel twist to the fact that the movie's villain is unapologetically God ― not a god, but the God, Yahweh standing in for Sauron ― but it doesn't make it any less boring. Legion steals every beat of The Terminator's plot by swapping the sci-fi elements out for religious ones but badly perverts its structure, replacing the aggressively-paced chase story and three strong central characters with a dull siege movie and a clusterfuck of interchangable redshirts. The movie is holed up in a diner until the final ten minutes and watching them repel enemy angels gets old very quickly. It's the same shit from every zombie movie going back to 1968's Night of the Living Dead reheated and served up for the thousandth time, and it's no longer appetizing.

All that said, I only saw this movie because the pregnant waitress / living MacGuffin is played by Adrianne Palicki from my favorite TV show Friday Night Lights, and on that count it delivered. She has the second most screentime of anyone besides Michael; even more than Dennis Quaid as the diner owner. But she's terrible here, as is Poor Man's Jude Law Paul Bettany performing Michael on the mistaken belief that a lack of any personality whatsoever equates to badass. The only hint of fun comes from Kevin Durand's Gabriel. He first caught my attention playing Martin Keamy, my all-time favorite antagonist from Lost, and he radiates awesome and deserves a big career. His talent is wasted in this movie but I'm looking forward to seeing him as Little John in Ridley Scott's Robin Hood come May.


1 Star out of 5