Legion: no New Moon

Having enjoyed the magic of New Moon recently, I decided to try my luck at another horrendous looking film, Legion. My hope was that it, too, would provide lots of unintentional comedy. While there was crap aplenty, a black hole of verbosity in the middle of the movie made it feel like cinematic molasses.

The premise of Legion is that God has had enough of our "bullshit" and decides to wipe us off the face of the earth with the help of his angels. The lone exception is the Archangel Michael (Paul Bettany), who falls to earth, cuts off his wings and raids weapons from a Chinese toy shop (?!) in order to protect the unborn bastard who is the only hope for humanity.

One can only speculate that budgetary constraints prevented a mass extermination of the human race from being presented in all its CGI glory. Instead, the audience is stuck in a desert diner to watch stock characters die unceremoniously, and come to the conclusion that the wrath of God is underwhelming.

God sends minions, sporadically and one at a time, who are easily killed by the human weapon of choice: bullets, then a wall of pestilence that does nothing more than irritate humans back to the diner, and a 'legion' of zombies that cannot actually kill the baby who is the ultimate target of the assault.

Archangel Gabriel (Kevin Durand) is dispatched to do the penultimate deed, with the help of his trusty spinning power tool mace and bullet proof wings. Yet, awesome-looking Gabriel is delayed by skinny, wingless Michael, then struggles to catch his targets in their escape car, even after the car flips over, three times. It is at this moment that you realize that Gabriel and God must be up against formidable foes since both mother and baby survive the accident without a scratch nor even a pause.

The parade of incompetence would be entertaining if the characters didn't insist on being so predictable and repetitive in their dialog for long stretches between action sequences. Thus, Legion is equivalent to a 45 minute lecture from your parents broken up by 5 minutes of attempting to shoot tin cans off a fence, and missing.

One could argue that when the story narrated at the start of the movie is repeated at the end, it means that things have come full circle. However, that would indicate progress, which is sorely lacking in this boring turd.