Legion: Liberate Me Ex Infernis
Filed under: Movies on Wednesday, August 4th, 2010 by Daniel Swensen | No Comments
You will believe an angel can suck.
Legion is the movie that dares to ask the question, “What if we remade The Prophecy without all that troublesome plot and characterization?” Loud, incoherent, and notably lacking in Viggo Mortenson taking a turn as Satan, Legion could be used as promotional material in the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement! Ha! Internet hyperbole! Seriously, though, it isn’t very good.
Ostensibly, the plot of Legion has something to do with God getting sick of humanity’s bullshit. That isn’t me being crass, that’s cribbed directly from the opening monololgue by the female lead, whose bored delivery sets the tone for the entire film. God has grown weary of our shenanigans, what with genocide and famine and Jersey Shore, and dispatches a buttload of angels down to destroy humanity, apparently by turning everyone into zombies with melting faces and limbs like Stretch Armstrong. Keeping to his covenant, God will never again destroy the earth by water, opting instead to bore us to death.
Chances are, in the last year or so, you’ve been subjected to the commercials for Legion, featuring the killer demon grandma and her amazing follow-up, killer demon ice cream guy. In the interest of saving everyone a little time, I’m going to bust out a hoary old chestnut from the bottom of the IMdB comments drawer: if you’ve seen the commercials, don’t bother with the movie. Those two moments are basically the highlights of the film. Legion has nothing else going for it.
In truth, we all should have seen this coming. When a bottom-drawer movie like Legion keeps playing the same two notes over and over again in its previews, you have to know something’s up. Yes, a little old lady gets possessed by a demon, swears a lot, crawls up the wall like Spidey on six cans of Red Bull, then gets blown away by a shotgun. Later, an ice cream man travels to the middle of the desert, shrieks like a dentist’s drill, then gets blown away by a shotgun.
Let me be clear… that’s the good stuff. If you really want to experience the novelty of watching an old lady say “fuck,” you could just rent any movie from the last fifteen years with Betty White in it. (Or, if you’re one of the lucky ones and your own grandma happens to like the profanity, just go wind her up instead.) On the other hand, if you want to see a mutant ice cream man, you could always just watch George Kennedy’s thirty-second bit in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot where he tells a little kid to go fuck a duck. Okay, so he’s neither a mutant nor technically an ice cream man, but there’s an ice cream truck in the shot, and frankly I think that should be enough for you. All hyperbole aside, I will bet you a real American dollar that those thirty seconds will probably yield more entertainment than the entirey of Legion.
But we were talking about the plot. Well, more’s the pity, because Legion is basically every zombie movie ever made, with angels instead of zombies. Or demons. Or something. Don’t look at me, I didn’t write this shit. The best bits are openly cribbed from The Prophecy, with angels having facedowns and talking about how super-cool humanity really is when you get right down to it. Unfortunately, instead of Christopher Walken being awesome, we get Kevin Durand as Gabriel, who has a motorized mace and metal wings so that when he pirouettes around like a ballet dancer, he cuts people to shreds. I am not making that up. Paul Bettany mumbles and stares his way through his role as the Archangel Michael, looking like he’d rather be just about anywhere else.
Like any good zombie movie (minus the “good” part), Legion features the usual gang of unsympathetic characters ready to turn on each other at a moment’s notice. Suburban Mom character unleashes a torrent of verbal abuse on Whorish Daughter character — is it because she’s a demon, or just a total bitch? We don’t really know. It’s one of the movie’s little mysteries. Meanwhile, Hook-Hand Veteran Guy relates a series of stultifying anecdotes about faith, or Vietnam, or land mines or something, establishing himself as the only character in the movie who could remotely be called two-dimensional. Later, when an accountant is crucified on a cross and blows up and turns out to be filled with acid (I am not making any of this up), Veteran Guy is liquified and dies a horrifying death. Now, if one of your oldest friends was hit with acid and turned to cottage cheese in front of your very eyes, which of the following would you do?
- Scream, wail, and have a panic attack
- Try to save him somehow
- Call 911
- Don’t react and then wander out of the scene as if nothing happened
I’ll let you guess which of these is correct. There’s also a bit where a guy tries to save a kid, but then the kid turns out to be evil. I guarantee you won’t see that one coming. It is a real shockeroo.
Legion ramps up the body count in the last few minutes, throwing people violently out of the movie after ninety minutes of lumbering exposition and barely acknowledging their loss. For a movie that’s supposedly about faith in humanity, Legion shows very little of that faith — it’s one biblical apocalypse that just might put you on the side of the vengeful god.
Crossposted from dimfuture.net.









