He's Tired of Your Bull

January is (or, at least, was) the dumping ground for film the studios aren't proud of. Gambles they took on ideas that didn't pan out, movies that probably sounded good on paper but ended up terrible in execution, weird ideas that are impossible to sell to the general public. If I film ends up too strange, too high-concept, or too terrible to release during the big movies seasons (which, at this point, is basically every month other than January) they'll dump it in the first month of the year, pray it makes some money from curious moviegoers, and then fades away without leaving too much of a stink.

When it comes to those three qualifiers -- strange, high concept, and bad -- Legion from 2010 manages to nail all three. Released in January of that year, the film is the exact kind of early year fodder you can expect from studios. It's a weird movie about evil possession, a film about the apocalypse, a movie where angels fight each other, where a baby is supposed to be the savior of mankind, while also being a horror film, an action movie, a love story, and a CGI thrill ride. It tries to do too much, in too many ways, and can't really nail any of its elements perfectly. It's not a good film by any measure.

And yet, at the same time, it is absolutely watchable. Powered by a strong, game cast who deserve to be in better movies, and going whole hog into a concept that just shouldn't work, Legion manages to find this weird middle zone of "high concept crap" that's actually really fun to watch. I would hardly ever recommend this film to normal viewers, but for anyone with a love of horror movie cheese that commits to its own bit with a straight face, Legion has everything you want in a bad movie.

Opening in L.A., we watch as Michael (Paul Bettany) arrives on Earth. Although is origins are, at first, unknown, we quickly see him take off a magical collar and do some surgery on his back, quickly telling us that he's an angel. He gathers a whole shit ton of guns and then blows his way out of a building, attracting the attention of a couple of cops. They try to arrest the angel, which doesn't exactly go well for them, and then one of the cops ends up possessed by... something. They say "the baby will die" before Michael shoots them, then the ex-angel hops in their car and heads out as, slowly, the city begins to go dark.

We then cut over to the next day, in Paradise Falls, at a shitty little gas station / diner. The diner is run by Bob Hanson (Dennis Quaid), with his son "Jeep" (Lucas Black) working as the mechanic at the station, and the girl Jeep likes, Charlie (Adrianne Palicki), is the waitress. Charlie, it should be noted, is eight months pregnant and is planning to put the kid up for adoption. Her plans for the kid, though, are put on hold once evil things start rolling up to the diner. an old lady shows up who seems sweet as can be, but then she goes evil as hell and takes a massive bite out of a customer. An evil ice cream man shows up and has to be put down. And then there are the other hordes of possessed people, and all the locusts that start showing up. Driving in through the middle of all this is Michael, there to save Charlie and her baby because the apocalypse is coming, at God's order, and the baby is the only hope humanity has to survive.

Legion is, no doubt, a very strange movie. At its core it has a cross between zombie invasion films and the Evil DeadStarted as a horror cheapie to get the foot in the door for three aspiring filmmakers -- Raimi, Tappert, and Campbell -- Evil Dead grew to have a life of its own, as well as launching the "splatstick" genre of horror-comedy. series. It has characters show up to lay nice and then say awful things to the characters, like "you're all going to burn" and "that baby will die", all while trying to build up this idea that the whole world is ending. It's like if the Deadites won in an Evil Dead film instead of just torturing some people and then fading off again quickly.

With that said, the comparison does this film no favors. It's nowhere near as scary as an Evil Dead nor as gory, this despite the film rocking a (seemingly unearned) R rating. It has moments where it plays towards horror, but it can never quite nail the tension or the scares. It feels muted somehow, like the creators had to try and make something palatable for the general public instead of letting the freak flag of this film fly. You have to think that the right director, with the right horror chops, could have made demonic (okay, angelic) possession story work. Writer-director Scott Stewart (who also went on to direct, of course, Priest) did not have those chops.

Also hobbling this film is that it isn't able to really convey the scope of its apocalypse. It locks us down to a single location, the diner in the middle of nowhere, and then barely gives us any characters to speak of. The setup could remind people of The Mist, except not nearly as well developed. That film had a bunch of people crammed together, yelling and screaming and going insane, while this film rushes the idea to get to its big reveal, never taking the time to really make us feel the apocalypse. Like with the horror of the film, the apocalypse scenario is half baked at best.

And the action is bad. A lot of the film is just people pointing guns while they flash into the night cross-cut with shots of bodies getting hit by bullets and falling over. I'd say a good fifteen minutes of the film is just guns firing and bodies toppling (maybe an exaggeration, but still). It feels like a lot, without much context because seeing guns firing and then bodies falling over in two different shots fails to deliver needed impact. It's a lot of sound and effects but no real context to give it weight. And because all the bodies being shot are just nameless possessed people who stand there and take it, it doesn't really feels like anything important has happened. People getting possessed and then being killed by survivors should have weight and meaning, but the way the story sets it up, and then the way the action is filmed, leaves it all feeling empty.

Finally, the film barely explains its whole scenario. The baby, who hasn't been born yet, will somehow save humanity. How? We don't know because that's never explained. The goal for Michael was the save the baby because God wanted the baby to die, but if the baby will live... something something humanity saved. We get a hint that a further film would be able to explain how the baby would grow up and save humanity, but that doesn't come in this film and, on its own, that's hardly a great hook o suck people in. "Yeah, you know, he'll save humanity eventually... somehow. Just don't ask questions."

In fact, the only reason this film works at all is because of its cast. The movie is packed with fantastic character actors -- Tyrese Gibson, Adrianne Palicki, Charles S. Dutton, Jon Tenney, Kevin Durand, Willa Holland, Kate Walsh -- along with a couple of far more famous leads -- Paul Bettany and Dennis Quaid. Even Lucas Black, of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift fame, does a credible job here in an underwritten role. The flaw with the film isn't the actors and, in fact, they're what save this terrible film, turning it into watchable cheese.

But cheese it is all the same. It's poorly made, poorly shot, and poorly written, and only because the actors give it their all does it come out watchable. I like this film, but as a guilty pleasure. It has an interesting idea (that it can't execute) and few decent, fleeting moments of good horror, but overall its bad. B-movie bad. "Why did Screen Gems spend $26 Mil on this?" bad. And yet they did, and we got this stupid, terrible, delightful bit of popcorn out of it. Oh, and a sequel TV series four years later for some unknown reason. Apparently "angels try to wipe out humanity" was a concept someone really believed in, even when the rest of the viewing public said "no".