Word: legendizes
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...adventurous filmmakers like Ridley Scott continue to buck the trend and spend the bucks on these archaic entertainments. Legend cost about $30 million, runs only 89 minutes in its current form, and had its U.S. release delayed for almost a year before surprising everybody with two consecutive top-grossing weeks. But even with this belated victory, why should Scott have bothered making Legend? Because, of all movie genres, the quest epic is the one most amenable to the artistic dictatorship of studio moviemaking. The fantasy world is not a photocopy of any world present or past; it exists only...
...rest of Legend, about an hour, is spent on the mundane but difficult tasks of climbing out of dungeons, scaling huge walls, crossing pirahna-infested moats and busting through magic doors. There is a climactic battle between Jack and Evil at the end, in which one of them wins and the other goes spinning off into an infinite void--you can guess who gets the girl and who gets the shaft...
Anyway, the problem with Legend is not that the plot is stupid--all fantasy movie plots are stupid--but that the characters are not even slightly interesting. In the best GOOD versus EVIL films, the hero and accompanying crew will have a sense of humour about what they are doing. They will have blemishes, character defects and haunting memories which motivate them. Jack has nothing but a pretty face and a set of isometrically honed forearms. Similarly, Lilly does not even have a trace of the independent bitchiness of Princess Leia, one of the few cinematic fantasy heroines that...
...Still, Legend might make a nice outing for kids. There's no sex or cursing, and the inevitable violence is done in soothing pastels with no major fatalities. The photography is quite lavish: the first half hour of the film gets by simply because the viewer is visually stunned. The special effects too are surprisingly tasteful, with the distorted faces of Evil's henchmen done with realism and restraint. Legend would probably be able to scare the average eight-year-old without producing traumatic night-mares...
...take the kids. But while they're watching and hoping that the order of the universe gets realigned, you might want to skip out to get a bite to eat or to get the car fixed or to update your insurance policies. In Legend, matters of Good and Evil just aren't for adults...