The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

At times, one Matthew Essner can get crushing really hard on fairly cool actors, and follow them into movies that he knows are going to be god awful, just because he’s there. This happened with Paul Bettany, and thus I found myself going to see the movie Legion, which, by all likelihood, was going to be a horrible piece of garbage. Still, I go for the company, and I hoped that it would at least be a silly, over-the-top piece of garbage that I could laugh at and still have a good time.
Legion completed failed at that. Completely.

In fact, it failed at whatever it was trying to do so badly, that I don’t really know what it was trying to do. I’m interested to know what the people who made this movie thought it was. Was it an action movie? Was it supposed to be horror? I’m really not sure. It doesn’t do either very well.

It’s not a very good horror movie because the “monsters” were completely lame. The transformation sequence of them shaking their heads with a stupid little effect was not going to strike terror into anyone. It is a stupid and cheap effect. The possessed people themselves have also just put in dark contacts and are wearing fake teeth. It looks like an effect I could create for a movie we were shooting for fun. It would be impressive in our movie. It just adds to the “budget” feel of the film here, especially since we’re talking about a film with one location for the entire thing.
The movie also attempts some elements of psychological horror. People die, and the movie attempts to make you connect with them in some way before that happens. However, it is done via what might be some of the worst dialog I have seen in a movie in a long time. Every single character has a speech that follows this pattern: “When I was young, every night, as I was tucked into bed, my mother would tell me that I need to be good, because if I’m not, God will be very displeased with me.” Something like that. They all are a parent pulling them aside every night, and almost every single statement is one that, if you told a kid that every night of their life, it would really fuck them up. Seriously, telling a kid every night that he needs to think about what he does because it may be his last day on earth? That could warp somebody. There were other examples too. The writing is so bad, and yet taken so seriously. Put in a different light, it would be funny. As it was, it was just painful. So, no, you don’t connect with any of the characters, and there is no mental horror aspect to the film as well.

That’s fine, of course. It doesn’t have to be a horror movie. Maybe it could be an action film. And, frankly, during the few times the movie is showing fight scenes, it is at its best. The fight scenes are no better than the dialog. They often don’t make any sense, and people use the very worst tactics. However, they do tend to be over the top and fun. Paul Bettany lighting the stream from a gas pump on fire by firing a pistol in order to set a van on fire so that he could pull someone out of the van? That shit is crazy, and is fun to watch.
However, the problem is that there is so very little of that. There’s only one other sequence of fighting along those lines, and that’s the finale. All the rest of the movie is people, in this diner, talking to each other very seriously about God, and things their parents said to them. If they had embraced the “badass angel fucking shit up” angle that the movie seemed like it would go for, it would have been a fairly entertaining movie, though pretty stupid. Like, let’s say, how G.I. Joe was. G.I. Joe was successful, and was a much better movie than Legion, because it didn’t take itself seriously and let itself be fun and stupid. Legion is so, so serious, and you will be left scratching your head as to why it is.

Add into all this sort of thing some fairly large plot holes and an awful, awful case of “we desperately need to set up a sequel even though the concept of this movie getting a sequel is fairly laughable” and you pretty well wrap up how much of a trainwreck this movie was. I had a fun time because I was sitting there making fun of it with Essner and Mason the whole time. If I hadn’t been, I would have been in constant pain. I don’t know what they were trying to do with this movie, but it’s pretty clear they failed.