Entertainment, Movies - Army Times

Smith is a powerful presence in eerie thriller

It all looks familiar ... those tall skyscrapers, the wide avenues, and hey, isn’t that Times Square?

Yet the streets of New York City are eerily silent and choked with weeds. And wait — was that a herd of deer that just went bounding up Fifth Avenue? And, uh ... is that a lioness that just took down a doe and is now leisurely snacking in the middle of an empty traffic intersection?

Talk about your urban jungles.

So begins the chillingly exhilarating “I Am Legend,” the third film based on Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel, following 1964’s “The Last Man on Earth,” and 1971’s “The Omega Man.”

Hollywood keeps coming back to this story because it poses an irresistible question: What would it be like to find that you’re the last human being on the planet?

This time around, that would be Will Smith as Robert Neville, a military virologist who survived a manmade virus that has wiped out most of humanity.

Manhattan — where the plague originated, making it a “ground zero” of a different sort here — is Neville’s stomping grounds.

His life consists of cruising the empty streets with his faithful dog, Sam, patrolling and foraging (and occasionally driving golf balls into New York Harbor off the deck of the carrier Intrepid). He also broadcasts daily messages across the AM dial, hoping someone will hear.

By night, however, he and Sam hole up in a heavily fortified Washington Square brownstone, with an automatic rifle close at hand, as unearthly howls rip the darkness outside.

When he manages to fall asleep, Neville endures a steady stream of nightmares about the events of three years earlier — the panic-filled days when the virus had just escaped and military aircraft were swooping in to destroy the Manhattan bridges and tunnels in a futile containment effort.

The back story unfolds in these flashbacks. The plague erupted when another scientist (Emma Thompson in an uncredited cameo) found a cure for cancer using a mutated form of the measles virus. Unfortunately, it later mutated further into a virulent, highly contagious form of rabies — and jumped the lab.

Ninety percent of the world’s 6 billion people died outright. Of the remaining 600 million, 1 percent, including Neville, found themselves naturally immune.

The rest turned into raging, mindless mutants (think “28 Weeks Later” on steroids) with an insatiable taste for flesh. Luckily for Neville, they’re also extremely sensitive to ultraviolet rays — sunlight.

Readers sometimes scold me for giving away too much plot, so I’m not going to say another word about what leaps off the screen.

But I will say that “I Am Legend” is one of the tightest action flicks in years. The script by Akiva Goldsman (working off an earlier screenplay by Mark Protosevich that, back in the ’90s, drew interest from Arnold Schwarzenegger and director Ridley Scott) is one long, uninterrupted rush.

And director Francis Lawrence, who has just one prior film to his name (2005’s “Constantine”), wastes not a single frame while delivering one spooky uppercut after another — all wrapped around a theme that carries special resonance in our hubristic age of biological weapons and genetic engineering. (Neville’s mantra, even as things fall apart around him, is: “I can fix this!”)

But the film might not have worked nearly as well with someone other than the magnetic Smith — ripped and cut to a body-fat level of about 0.5 percent — in the lead.

In a nuanced role that requires much nonverbal acting, Smith reminds us why he’s atop the A-list with a deeply emotional portrayal of a man slowly going bonkers from lack of human contact and the stress of constant hair-trigger vigilance.

Purists who can’t abide even tiny plot holes may quibble over a few things in the script, but most fans of sci-fi flicks — especially the post-apocalyptic division — will depart “I Am Legend” feeling like I did:

Can’t wait to see it again.