In I Am Legend, Robert Neville (Will Smith) thinks he's the last man alive, and he's got good reason to believe it's true. After all, he's got Manhattan all to himself. Well, almost to himself. After a supposed cure for cancer goes horribly awry and ends up killing most of Midtown's population, the island is locked off and Neville discovers that he's the only man in the Big Apple who's somehow immune to the aggressively contagious disease that somehow spawned from the cancer cure. Most died from the plague, but a large number have evolved into fiendish creatures of the night - part-zombie and part-vampire - and they're getting hungry. Three years after the viral disaster, Neville spends his days hunting for food and for creatures to experiment on in his basement lab. He's trying to find the cure for the disease-ravaged monsters, hoping that he'll be able to cure them of their general creature-ness (of course, their plight was all started by a cure, so, they have reason to be wary). At night, Neville boards up his windows and huddles next to his shotgun and his dog, hoping that the rest of the "citizens" of New York never find him.

The original book by Richard Matheson, often credited with being a major influence on the zombie movie genre, has been working its way through the Hollywood machine for years. Ridley Scott almost directed Arnold Schwarzenneger in the lead role before the budget got too high for Warner Brothers. Michael Bay was even recently attached with Smith in the lead role. Eventually, the project ended up in the hands of Constantine director Francis Lawrence. That should have been the first sign that there would be problems. Constantine is far from a horrible film, but Lawrence isn't mentioned in the same sentences with Scott or Bay for a reason, and it's the decisions he makes that turn I Am Legend into one of the most frustrating films of the year. I am Legend? No chance. I am Bored.

First and foremost, I Am Legend is basically a one-man show, and the film falters through no fault of the actor cast in the challenging lead role. Will Smith has long-ago proven that he's one of the better mainstream actors in Hollywood, and his performance alone saves I Am Legend from complete disaster. But he's constantly fighting against the flaws of the script and the production, which ultimately prove more deadly than even the creatures of the night.

The most notable flaw of I Am Legend has to be the legion of undead New Yorkers, which feature the worst creature design of the year, by far. The monsters in I Am Legend never once look genuine. They look like CGI creations from a lab and are nothing more than cartoons inserted in post-production to fight our hero. The machines in Transformers actually felt like they shared physical space with the characters, a feeling that almost never translates to anything that happens around Neville in I Am Legend. It might sound like nit-picking, but the decision to make the creatures look like characters in a Wii game can't be understated. We need to feel the tension of Neville being the last man alive for I Am Legend to work, and the incredibly poor special effects constantly pull us out of anything real and constantly remind us we're watching a Hollywood product.

The creature design would be enough to sink I Am Legend alone, but the script is almost as frustrating. Like its mentally troubled lead, Legend keeps switching gears erratically, flip-flopping from character study to action movie and back, and never finds a way to merge the two. When it focuses on the fact that Neville might be going a little crazy after three years of solitude, the film actually works because Smith is such a strong dramatic actor, but screenwriter Mark Protosevich doesn't let that develop into anything truly interesting because he's got to work within the confines of what fans expect from a Hollywood blockbuster creature feature. I Am Legend should be a stark, frightening story of post-apocalyptic New York, but the film is shockingly never once scary, valuing countless overhead shots of an empty Manhattan over anything relatable. And the script tragically falls apart under the weight of its plot holes after any sort of cursory examination. Not enough character, no tension, unbelievable creatures - what's left? I Am Legend has been a part of the Hollywood tapestry for decades, thanks to previous adaptations and the time it took for this version to spring to life. It's just too bad it ended up so dead on arrival.