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"Will Smith Delivers in "I Am Legend""

One-man performances are tricky to pull off, either on stage or on film. To get people to pay to see these performances, one has to be sure that a) the performance is good enough to keep an entire show afloat; b) the audience has enough to be entertained by the show for its running time and c) most crucially, the audience is willing to invest their time and money to watch one actor by himself for two hours in the first place. Will Smith accomplishes just that in "I Am Legend."

This is Smith's second foray into films adapted from revered science-fiction novels, the first being 2004's "I, Robot," adapted from the Isaac Asimov classic. While "Legend," adapted from the Richard Matheson novel by Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman, suffers from the former's ability to oversimplify the complex material and mold it into a popcorn action thriller, this film is much better about asking questions about keeping faith and hope alive when all seems lost. Why bother continuing to look for a hope for humanity when it is all but extinct and why hold on to hope when those you loved are never coming back?

This ranks as one of Smith's career-best performances. His acting has gotten steadily better in recent years (and has netted him two Oscar nominations, for "Ali" and "The Pursuit of Happyness"). Here, in what could seem like a gimmick that allows Smith to show off his thespian skills, Smith does a great job reigning in his so-called "Willisms." Those "Willisms" include, but are not limited to: acting too cool for everyone in the room, shouting off a bunch of hip-hop one-liners and talking tough to CGI beasts (think of his acting from "The Fresh Prince" all the way up to "Men in Black" and even beyond).

He could have easily treated the monsters in "Legend" like he did the morally conflicted murder suspect in "Robot," but instead downplays his natural tendencies. He allows the weight of trying to save a possibly lost civilization to crush him at times. Witness a scene halfway through the film, where Smith, desperately lonely for any kind of interaction, pleads with a mannequin in a store to talk back. His conversations add a little bit of light humor to the dark surroundings, but this scene is appropriately heartbreaking when it easily could have slipped off into corny "Willism" mode.

The film is set in 2012. Three years previous, a doctor had developed an apparently 100-percent successful cure for cancer. The cure acts as a virus that is injected

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