Movie Review Legion - Angels Are Watching Over You...Sort Of

Legion (2010) is a horror flick with some pretensions. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, it generally ensures that you can forgive minor grains of sand that could otherwise be irritating. In a truck stop in the Mohave desert a mismatched group of people seem to be gathering by coincidence. There’s the reluctantly pregnant girl Charlie (Adrianne Palicki), Bob Hanson (Dennis Quaid) and his son Jeep (Lucas Black) who own the place, Kyle Williams (Tyrese Gibson) who only stops for directions and the use of a phone, Percy Walker (Charles S. Dutton) the short order cook and the Anderson family, Howard (Jon Tenney) and Sandra (Kate Walsh) and their slightly rebellious daughter Audrey (Willa Holland).

When the television stops working and the phones die any seasoned horror movie watcher knows that something bad is coming. The first sign of how bad the bad thing that’s coming really is becomes obvious when the little old lady Gladys (Jeanette Miller) comes though the door with her walker and proceeds to smile beneficently at the gathering before she suddenly takes a bite out of Howard’s neck and then scales the wall like an insect.

Seconds later the extremely soft spoken and together Michael (Paul Bettany) shows up in a stolen police car with an armoury in the trunk and proceeds to proclaim that the end is nigh. Literally.

It turns out that Charlie’s unborn child is the only hope of all of mankind and that Michael is there to make sure that the child survives. The bad things that are coming are sent by God himself to wipe humanity out, a sort of etch-a-sketch approach to what ails the world. The archangel has actually gone against orders and come to our aid. Wave after wave of people possessed by angels attack the diner and decimate the survivors within until finally Michael’s equal, Gabriel (Kevin Durand) comes to put an end to the disobedience. By then Charlie has had the baby, so the morality of the whole thing has changed.

There are many little moments in this movie that really shine. Most of them have Paul Bettany in them. He speaks so softly and so convincingly, and he kicks some righteous behind in a way I, for one, really enjoyed. I’ve not seen him do action like this before, but he certainly has the physical presence for it. Adrianne Palicki gives a very good performance as the big-bellied Charlie, still smoking when she’s nine months pregnant, which is upsetting enough to watch in and of itself. Lucas Black does a very good job of portraying the steadfast Jeep who is actually good enough in his own way that he has managed to help Michael retain his faith in mankind as a whole, and Dennis Quaid is really a spectacularly good down-on-his-luck loser with something like a heart of gold, even when he falls asleep on the job.

Article Author: Mule

Mule watches a lot of movies. Mule has also studied movies at university level, which means Mule does not only blithely blither on about liking or not liking stuff. Well, not entirely blithely anyway.

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