'Legion'

Oh, 'Legion'. This is a daffy film that is going onto my schlocky horror shelf as soon as it comes out on DVD.

The concept was promising, but not of a good film. The trailers were disappointing. The reviews were plain bad. But, being an open minded kind of girl, I agreed to go along and see it, admittedly with some reluctance. I was overwhelmed by the sheer majesty of silly this film contains. I was never quite sure whether I was being caught in a sly wink from the film-makers or a glorious failure to make a serious film. About Armageddon.

The plot is pretty classic: a group of misfits in a diner called Paradise Falls (that's the third use of that name I've seen recently) come under seige by supernatural forces. Turns out God has decided to destroy humanity (in a significantly less efficient way than the flood) and the last hope is the unborn baby of Charlie, a waitress at the diner (Supernatural's Adrienne Palicki). An angel called Michael (yes, that Michael) played by the distinctly scraggly Paul Bettany has gone rogue and wants to protect this baby.

So you've got the rogue angel, the pregnant woman in a siege, the small band of survivors against impossible odds. It's pretty cool. The acting is all right in places with a decent amount of talent thrown into the mix (Dennis Quaid, Paul Bettany, Lucas Black of 'American Gothic', Kate Walsh from 'Grey's Anatomy' and 'Private Practice') and while the script is, on the whole, quite bad, there are some especially fine quotable lines. If the 'spider-gran' bit hadn't been shown in every damn trailer, it would have been genuinely freaky. There is precisely one awesome fight scene, between Michael the rogue angel and Gabriel the loyal one (played by Kevin Durand, best known to me as Joshua from 'Dark Angel'), which is equal parts cool and silly (Swiss army mace, the noise Gabriel's whirligig of defensive wings makes as he deflects bullets, etc.) and doesn't really get going until Michael is divested of all of his guns.

This film shuttles between making me laugh and actually being genuinely good. The supposedly intense emotional scenes pretty much fall flat, a couple going that extra mile to really hilarious (the way the heart-to-heart between Charlie and Michael is shot makes it look like she's got a vestigial extra head and a beloved character is killed by explosive stomach acid). The characters are actually quite well done, with the long setup before the action starts paying off, but there are some decidedly sloppy things. Like, in their determination to only have a symbolically appropriate trio alive at the end, they kill off a decently well-developed character with a handwave. There are some genuinely creepy moments (I knew ice cream trucks were evil) but they are ruined by not following through or by narm-tastic moments. The much-trailered elastic ice-cream man is casually shot down before he poses any real threat, and a seriously creepy sequence with a possessed small child and a kitchen knife becomes gruesomely funny when someone (I think either himself or Michael, but it's ambiguous) cuts off his thumbs and he looks down forlornly as they spurt. Then it gets creepy again, but a ripple of laughter did run across the cinema at that point.

There were opportunities not taken up in the obsession with gun porn and religious subtext, such as a never-explained but really damn creepy girl with a bloody bag over her head banging manically on a car bonnet. I mean, put her in a movie of her own about a haunted orphanage and I'd have nightmares for a week.

The best thing about this film was undoubtedly Michael. OK, he was silly at points (walking out of a burning cross in the side of a building? Really, movie?) and an opportunity for a really cool fight was completely missed at the end, considering I'd been crossing my fingers and hoping for a burning sword vs Swiss army mace battle royale for the entire film, but Bettany is pretty much perfect as the intensely moral, just-compassionate-enough angel. I'm glad they let him use his British accent - it gave the character a nice touch of the otherwordly in an American-dominated film. Nice to know we Brits are either evil or angels in Hollywood, and the moment when he slides over the counter and lands all action-posey in front of Charlie gave me another action-angel to fangirl. Still, I really wish they had let him do more than one melee action scene. I would have paid just to see him go medieval on a crowd of zombie-angel-people (who apparently are no longer people and therefore totally OK to kill mercilessly).

The structure of the film was good, though a little lurching between set-pieces, but the ending just kind of petered out. They had far too much plot in a film that quite happily skated along on action scenes, and the sun-soaked journey over desert crags to the promised land reminded me of precisely what the ending of 'Planet Terror' was parodying. On the plus side, the main couple didn't explicitly get together at the end, and I'll count my blessings that the film skimmed over the final plot pieces involving the two least interesting characters in the movie. It's not quite on a par with, say, 'Revelation' (not the sequel to 'Apocalypse' from 1999 but the one with Udo Kier and Terence Stamp from 2001) in terms of silly, but I'd put this on an evening's schedule for bad-film-watching. It fits pretty much perfectly between the slices of bad but boring and so bad it's painful. For me, this is the definition of 'so bad it's good' and for sheer entertainment value, intentional or not, I don't begrudge paying to watch this in the cinema. Don't expect it to be good, but do expect it to be fun.