When The Last Angel Falls, The Fight For Mankind Begins.
Starring: Paul Bettany, Dennis Quaid, Lucas Black, Tyrese Gibson, Adrianne Palicki, Charles S. Dutton, Kevin Durand, Willa Ford, Jon Tenney, Kate Walsh, Doug Jones
Director: Scott Stewart
2010 | 100 Minutes | Rated R
“I said your fucking baby’s gonna burn.” – Gladys Foster
Legion was a movie that moderately interested me when it hit theaters but it didn’t make much of an impact at the box office nor did it make enough of an impact in my memory to cause me to track it down… until now.
When God sends his legion of angels to bring on the apocalypse, humanity’s only hope lies in a group of strangers trapped in a desert diner with the Archangel Michael (Paul Bettany).
I have a sort of unwritten rule that a movie has 15-20 minutes to grab my attention. Legion is one of those movies that really pushed that internal timer to its limit. It’s at the 20 minute mark, after boring the viewer with stories of unwed mothers and mini-skirted teens, that Gladys Foster shuffles into the small town diner and orders a steak… rare. Shit then hits the fan… hard.
Unfortunately, the moment when things start to get exciting/scary is also when this movie starts to get REAL cheesy. The kooky granny scaling the ceiling. The ice cream man stretchy killer angel. The movie sets out to be something of a action horror movie but rarely gets exciting and never gets scary. I’d say that Legion is a case of style over substance but Legion doesn’t really have any style to speak of.
The acting is hammy as can be. Dennis Quaid, someone who is usually a dependable actor, turns in a performance that makes his GI Joe character look like something that could legitimately win trophies of naked gold guys.
The only cool parts are the battles between de-winged archangel Michael and winged, armored angel Gabriel. It helps to have Kevin Durand in the role of Gabriel. Durand is always enjoyable to watch in bad guy bad ass roles.
Legion is a classic could-have-been-good. There was some potential buried somewhere in this movie. The cast was solid, they just needed some competent writing and direction as well as some GOOD scares and action and we’d have something pretty cool. But it was not to be.
Action Movie Fanatix 