I am Legend

A buff and chiseled Will Smith tears through the deserted and apolcalyptic streets of Manhattan in his Mustang Shelby in the striking opening scenes of "I Am Legend." He carries a high-powered rifle by his side, his German shepherd Sam is in the front seat, and he's out hunting galloping herds of deer, which bounce through the midtown streets, now overgrown with weeds and cluttered with deserted cars frozen in permanent gridlock. Smith is playing Robert Neville, the last man alive in New York and perhaps on the planet. A deadly virus, the fatally ironic result of a "cure" for cancer that backfired, has wiped out all but those few who, like Neville, are immune to the virus. Neville has the run of the city during the day, but at night he boards himself up in his Washington Square townhouse. For at night, the Infected come out; they are contaminated humans who have mutated into raging, flesh-eating zombie vampires who cannot tolerate daylight.The screenwriters and Francis Lawrence, the director, have found clever ways to sustain what is, for more than half the movie, a one-man show. It helps, of course, that Smith is that one man; there are few movie stars who can hold the screen with such effortless charisma and who deliver most of their lines to a dog. The reviews are good on the whole but say that the visionary depiction of a postplague world, where a solitary man tries to hold on to his sanity, gives way to an intense but quite conventional night-of-the-living-dead remix and the vampires/zombies are there for cheap thrills. I am told by a sci-fi enthousiast who knows about these things that there is a metaphysical dimension to the film as well.
As for the dog: Abbey is a 3 year old German Shepherd and is called Sam in the film. She was not discovered on the streets of NYC or at a Hollywood casting call but was hand picked and rescued from a California kennel. Experienced trainer, Steve Berens, selected and gave her three weeks of intensive coaching before introducing her to the rest of the cast. While there may have been some "creative differences" at the start -she barked at Will when he first walked up to her- after a short while, the two became friends.
She might be the only reason I would want to see the film.