|
|
Film
|
|
The Legend Grows
On average, for every dollar Will Smith gets paid, Hollywood makes ten at the box office. And his latest looks once again to be right on the money.
Saturday, December 15, 2007
By Brent Simon
|
|
|
Reel Media International
Photo
|
|
The Last Man on Earth (1964)
|
|
Not too long ago, Newsweek did a story, part feature piece and part analytical, business-minded op-ed, in which they identified Will Smith as the most powerful actor in Hollywood. He is, quite simply, “the $4 billion man,” a reference to the combined (rounded slightly down) worldwide gross of his films.
In an industry where an actor’s staying power is determined largely by opening weekend numbers, Smith represents the surest bet out there - a bankable star with pan-gender and pan-ethnic appeal, and testable experience in almost every major genre: action-comedy, science-fiction thriller, romantic-comedy and drama. In fact, it was last year’s The Pursuit of Happyness, a muted film for which Smith championed Italian director Gabriele Muccino, that truly opened the industry’s eyes to Smith’s reach. Shot on location in San Francisco for a relatively modest $55 million, the movie secured Smith his second Best Actor Oscar nomination and grossed an astonishing $305 million worldwide, $140 million of that coming from overseas.
|
|
Warner Bros.
Photo
|
|
The Omega Man (1971)
|
|
|
His latest film, I Am Legend, then, represents Smith taking his big-time summer credibility (Independence Day, both Men in Black flicks, I, Robot) out for a test-drive spin during the December-to-remember holiday season, which heretofore has been used to showcase only his more overtly dramatic fare, inclusive of the aforementioned Happyness, 2001’s Ali and 1993’s Six Degrees of Separation, an early crossover effort from director Fred Schepisi and playwright John Guare.
Still, it’s not quite as strange a seasonal placement as it seems at first blush. I Am Legend has a science-fiction-inspired premise, and some very active and tense moments that I suppose you could characterize as action scenes. But it’s also a very expensive character study.
Despite its rich screen heritage (the movie is the third adaptation of Richard Matheson’s original post-apocalyptic story, which also birthed Vincent Price’s more forthrightly titled The Last Man on Earth and Charlton Heston’s The Omega Man), and the fact that over the past decade many different possible director-star iterations were kicked about for an update, I Am Legend is distinctively suited to Smith’s extremely likeable star wattage. It’s not unlike Tom Hanks’ turn in Cast Away, a fellow holiday season release back in 2000.
|
|
20th Century Fox
Photo
|
|
28 Days Later (2002)
|
|
|
The uniqueness and extent to which the film is a head trip solo show has marketers at Warner Bros. reaching deep into their playbook, pulling out little-used gambits that sound and feel like part of the star system of Hollywood of yesteryear. (Says one set of TV trailers: “There are not enough words to describe the power of… I Am Legend”.)
Set in 2012, the film stars Smith as Robert Neville, a brilliant soldier-scientist who, despite being present at “Ground Zero,” could not contain a terribly lethal, human-engineered virus, the result of research work to cure cancer. Somehow immune, Neville is now the last (wholly) human survivor in what is left of New York City, and maybe the entire world.
For three years, Neville has faithfully sent out daily radio messages, desperate to find any other survivors who might be out there. He’s also continued research on mutant victims of the plague, vampiric creatures who lurk in the shadows, watching Neville’s every move and waiting for him to make a mistake. As mankind’s last hope, Neville is driven by only one remaining mission: to find a way to reverse the effects of the virus using his own immune blood. He knows, however, that he’s both outnumbered and running out of time.
|
|
Warner Bros.
Photo
|
|
I Am Legend (2008)
|
|
|
Directed by Francis Lawrence (Constantine), I Am Legend makes ace usage of its locale, an evacuated Manhattan. Think of the eerie Tom Cruise/deserted Times Square sequence in Vanilla Sky and Cillian Murphy wandering about a desolate London in 28 Days Later, add them together and you have just about half of the total unforgettable effectiveness of I Am Legend’s expansive outdoor passages, which are both wondrous and downright eerie.
The jointly remarkable and unremarkable thing about the movie, then (unremarkable in that it’s the best, most natural way to tell the story, yet remarkable in that they actually got away with it in this day and age) is the fashion in which this visual desolation and dereliction dovetails and works so well with Smith’s superb work as the understandably stressed-out Neville, who has only his dog for companionship.
There are scenes in which we see that, in order to psychologically cope with the complete destruction of humanity, Neville has set up clothed mannequins (with whom he chats), and includes pedestrian rituals such as going to the video store in his daily routine. For most of the movie it’s not quite an Apocalypse Now-type descent into madness - Neville sleeps in a bathtub with a shotgun, but also recites Shrek from memory - yet a little past halfway in, there’s a galvanizing scene which becomes even more chillingly effective when you realize that your first instincts, of a trap being sprung on Neville, are incorrect.
Without giving away twists of the final act, including two bits which require a significant acquiescence to convenience, I Am Legend fits comfortably among a spate of recent films — inclusive of dramas, thrillers, action pictures and anxiety-infused comedies — which all can be boiled down, without much difficulty, to an underlying theme: we are lost.
That’s the predominant American screen narrative of our times, and it’s at the core of this engrossing apocalyptic drama about one man trying to stave off human extinction and “light up the darkness,” as Bob Marley sings on the CD to which he faithfully listens. Of course, for an audience, being lost with Will Smith helps make that quest more than a little easier and palatable. He may soon yet be “the $5 billion man.”
|
|
|
|
|
 Email
|
 Print
|
|
|
|
|
|