Somewhere in the world, there is a very happy 13-year-old Evangelical Christian boy. After years of struggling to find a happy compromise between Bible-thumping religiosity and the bullet-riddled fight scenes of modern action flicks, Hollywood has finally melded the two together in the most maladroitly literal way possible. With the release of ""Legion,"" hyperactive Sunday school graduates have finally realized their ultimate wet dream fantasy: angels fighting with machine guns.
The movie's entire premise rests in that incredibly laughable combination of five words. Paul Bettany, who between this and ""The Da Vinci Code"" has really cornered the market on pale religious killing machine roles, plays Michael, the main gun-toting angel. He rebels against heaven and tries to save humanity after the big guy upstairs decides to shake his holy Etch-a-Sketch and wipe out mankind. Michael's plan rests on protecting the savior of mankind, who is currently hanging out in the womb of a knocked-up country waitress (Adrianne Palicki) working in some middle-of-nowhere diner. As armies of possessed humans descend on the diner to take out the holy progeny, the diner's owner (Dennis Quaid), his son (Lucas Black) and a motley band of soon-to-be dead customers team up with Michael to save the world.
Technically it is a bit of a spoiler to call the customers ""soon-to-be-dead,"" but only to the extent that saying the boat sinks at the end of ""Titanic"" is a spoiler, or that at some point in a Michael Bay movie shit gets blown up. From the moment each character is introduced, it is obvious who is going to live, who is going to die and who is going to explode in a burst of acidic slime. It's a wonder why each of these future victims is given a bit of back story, because neither the audience nor director Scott Stewart think of these glorified extras as anything more than walking bags of meat.
Granted, those back stories might be slightly interesting if the dialogue didn't sound like it was written by Animal from the Muppets. Every line in the movie is overly simplistic and repetitive. It brings to mind the kind of dialogue high school students write in foreign language classes when performing a skit, only they can't form sentences any more complicated than ""Yo quiero queso."" Without doing any research into screenwriter Peter Schink's background, it is entirely possible that he is actually a third-grader in Spain learning English. Actually, that would be insulting to Spanish third-graders. He's probably a dim-witted second-grader.
But somehow the plot reaches even further levels of asininity than the dialouge. As if ""angels with guns"" isn't half-baked enough, the apocalypse begins when an elderly grandmother type wanders into the diner, starts cursing like a rabid George Carlin and takes a bite out of a guy's neck, then does her best Spider-Man impression by climbing on the ceiling before getting capped. It is the most ridiculous scene in a movie since Patrick Swayze ripped out a guy's throat in ""Road House,"" yet ""Legion"" tries to play it as legitimate terror. The adventures of unintentional absurdity continue with a knife-wielding kindergartener, angel kung-fu in a fight between Michael and evil angel Gabriel (Kevin Durand) and our heroes fleeing from Gabriel by climbing a mountain, even though he's an angel and can, you know, fly.
Add that to a low budget that results in painfully simple sets and nonexistent special effects, and ""Legion"" isn't even fun to look at. More effort probably went into a single poster for ""Avatar"" than this piece of refuse.
Of course, ""Legion"" isn't alone in the realm of refuse. There are a wealth of moronic things that populate this world. Baconaise. Sarah Palin. Anybody who refers to themselves as ""The Situation."" These and other idols of idiocy have been a scourge on society since the creation of social constructs like culture and dignity. But above all else, above all the filth and dreck that has come to populate modern society, only one can be the king of stupidity. That king is ""Legion.""
