Zombie/Angels - Zombels?

If you must see this film, scoop your brain into that handy bin placed just outside the cinema entrance first. All of it. Not even a tiny fragment of gray matter must remain. Perhaps you could fill the remaining void with popcorn – sweet or salted, it’s your choice. Now you can sit slack-jawed and watch the moving pictures and bright lights with a little bit of saliva dribbling off your chin. Now it might not be so obnoxiously woeful.

So, God is mad. Humans have become an irritant again, all they do is fight and kill one another and he wants to exterminate the human race. Apparently the best way to do this is to send out angels to possess humans, turning them into zombie-like creatures which makes them… well… fight and kill one another. The only hope for humanity is a pregnant waitress in a dead end diner in the middle of the desert who Paul Bettany’s renegade angel Michael has decided to protect. She is surrounded by a handful of token ‘random strangers’ and there you have it.

Although the entire world is infected with this plague of zombies/angels (Zombels?), the action is solely focussed on the diner. Apart from a fun sequence with an elderly lady crawling up the wall (which is ruined if you have seen the trailer) it’s all terribly dull and boring. Possessed humans turn up at the diner, are slaughtered with machine guns, then more turn up and the same happens all over again. God was so successful last time with the flood. Why has he changed his plans so drastically?

Oh and angels? They’re bad ass. Armoured fighting machines armed to the teeth with semi automatic weaponry and with moves straight from a fighting game. Yet even an angel on angel fight in the third act feels tired and slow. not even the addition of a many bladed multi attachment mace wielded by the Angel Gabriel can save this from being terribly dull stuff.

The characters are little less than roughly sketched stereotypes; the short skirted rebellious daughter of an arguing couple, the religious war veteran chef and the black gangster with a gun in his back pocket that he’s never fired and a baby he isn’t allowed to see.

The dialogue between them is stilted and slow and makes you wish for the machine guns to start once again. It’s no secret that there are never many survivors in this kind of thing but the film employs a strange way of killing them off. Previously semi-important characters who have been saved from the clutches of death only a scene before are suddenly picked off and no one really seems to notice. It’s horribly flawed film making. Let’s not even start on the fact that although this baby is the future of humanity, there is a strong hint at more survivors.

As ever, Paul Bettany gives a good if slightly bored performance and Dennis Quaid manages to be ridiculously irritating. Lucas Black’s character meanwhile is horribly reminiscent of Ben Stiller’s Simple Jack in Tropic Thunder with his puppy dog Southernisms.

It’s dull, tired and doesn’t even try for convincing in its ridiculousness. This is the kind of film that they stopped making back when they realised we weren’t idiots. Don’t do it.

Running Time: 100 mins
Company: Bold Films
Certificate: 15
Starring: Paul Bettany, Lucas Black, Dennis Quaid, Adrianne Palicki
Director: Scott Stewart
Homepage: www.legionmovie.com