MovieSet: Legion

Movies have to make sense. They don’t have to play by the rules of our reality, but they have play fair within its own world. A great movie leaves you without any questions about its plot. A good movie could have you questioning a few things, but you allow it. A bad movie leaves you in a confused ramble as you leave the theatre. Legion is a bad movie.

In a terrible voice-over that is way too similar to the Terminator series, Charlie (Friday Night Light’s Adrianne Palicki) gives an anecdote her mother told her. It’s about how God will end it all because he’s tired of the bullshit. Okay that has the potential to be pretty cool. Then Michael (Paul Bettany) comes down from heaven and he has a collar! Wait, angels have collars? Then he painfully cuts off his wings and then his collar falls off! Wait, what did the collar prevent him from doing? Before that reasonable question could be answered, Michael gets an insane amount of guns. There is stopped by some cops who get possessed…by angels? Wait, angels can possess people and make them look like doped up sharks? Okay…

So Michael races to this diner in the middle of nowhere to protect pregnant Charlie because her baby will save mankind. So God was tired of the bullshit but He has this savior back up plan? A back up plan that, once again, sounds very similar to The Terminator? Whatever. The rest of the movie is about the characters trying to survive at the diner as hoards and hoards of possessed people attack. Of course none of the 2-D characters at the diner become possessed because…actually they never explained that. Nor did they explain how that kid will save humanity from God. Nor did they explain why the possessed people didn’t just all attack at once. Let’s focus on that one. Why in the world would the angels send waves against the diner? The best scene in the movie is one staring the wonderful Doug Jones. An Ice Cream Truck drives up creepily to the diner and then the man inside (Jones) morphs into a creeper spider hybrid. It’s creepy and cool but why did it occur? It’s insanely impractical!

This movie is all over the place in terms of tone. It wants to have silly Evil Dead-esque moments, but then has terrible monologues that beg you to care about these dull characters. Even if you try to turn your brain off, which seems like a dangerous task, the movie doesn’t work. The action is hard to decipher at times and they keep building everything up to one awesome fight. Not to spoil anything, they completely and utterly dropped the ball. In fact the whole last act is full of twists so contradicting that it could give you an aneurism. I’m not saying seeing this movie can be dangerous to your health, but do you really want to risk it?

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