Will Smith Says, “Aw, Hell No!” to Quality

I downloaded the song “Men in Black” yesterday on Napster, and while listening to it, I openly wept, overwhelmed with nostalgia for the time in my life when I would actually highly anticipate the next Will Smith movie. Nowadays, it seems hardly worth the bother to go to whatever toothless movie he’s toplining. It’s doubtless been gutted by test audiences and studio suits. That’s why I skipped “Hancock” completely, though it was a ginormous hit. Regardless, the film is one of those blockbusters that everyone saw and no one really liked — another movie that coasts on Smith’s charisma, but completely wastes him at the very same time.

Enter “I Am Legend.” I was cautiously optimistic about that one. I prefer Smith as a comedic foil, yet he can anchor a film as an action hero just as easily. At any rate, I wasn’t worried about him being able to deliver. Yet the movie, despite his performance, is a clunker. Some folks overlook the film’s awfulness because the first half is relatively strong, but I’m not going to give a movie a thumbs up because it only sucks for one hour rather than two. Movie-goers need to be more demanding or Hollywood’s going to keep cranking out more banality.

Enter the prequel to “I Am Legend.” According to CHUD.com, Warner Bros. is developing “I Am Legend: Episode One - The Phantom Fake-Looking Zombie/Vampire Menace.” Let me be the first to make a farting sound that will register as my acute disapproval for this project.

I dunno about you, but I’m experiencing prequel fatigue. “Prequel” shouldn’t even be a word, let alone a studio’s preferred method of franchising a property. But I guess they can’t make an honest sequel to “I Am Legend,” considering that (*Spoiler Territory Ahead*) Smith’s character dies at the end of the film, and he wasn’t even the last person on Earth to begin with (*Now Leaving Spoiler Territory*). All that being said, I don’t see how the filmmakers can wring a whole ‘nother story out of this. I imagine the movie will be nothing more than an extended episode of “This Old Zombie-Proof House,” two hours of Smith boarding up windows and doors.

There’s a problem with prequels that no one ever talks about, and that problem is this: If there were a story worth telling before the original film is set, the filmmakers would’ve told that story first. In “I Am Legend,” the filmmakers to their credit skip over all the boring expository stuff and get to the meat of the story. Audiences, being the sophisticates that we are, sort of fill in the blanks when this sort of thing happens. Because Smith’s pet German Shepherd is fully grown (it’s a puppy in the opening moments of the film), Times Square looks like the Rainforest Cafe and Smith lives in a fortified Brownstone, we imagine that nothing terribly interesting took place in the intervening years between the outbreak of the plague and the when the film begins in earnest. Moreover, we’re not too stupid to understand that there’s been a passage of time, nor are we incapable of comprehending the reality of the story world without gobs of exposition.

So what the stink do we need a prequel for? We don’t. Prequels are by and large worthless, the filmic equivalent of flotsam. When Warner Bros. drops this “I Am Legend” prequel on us in a couple of years, I hope you’ll join me in collectively telling the studio, “Aw, hell no.”

-Brad Lohan

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