Legendary

Released by: Lionsgate
Released on: July 29th, 2014.
Director: Eric Styles
Cast: Scott Adkins, Dolph Lundgren
Year: 2014
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The Movie:

What a croc!

Let's get one thing straight right off the bat. LEGENDARY is a stupid movie. In fact, it's an unusually stupid movie. Cut from the same cloth that brought you all those cgi infested crapfests at the SyFy channel, this one is only a step above junk like SHARKANADO.

Cryptozoologist (look it up people) Travis Preston (Scott Adkins) has recently returned from a botched expedition where a team member died at the claws of a royally pissed off possibly prehistoric bear. Preston also harbors a righteous grudge against former team member/hunter Jim Harker (Dolph Lundgren) who he holds partially responsible. Flash forward to Preston getting called in by a wealthy individual to capture an ancient lizard/crocodile/cgi created thingy in China. Said creature has been slaughtering miners and various faceless characters in a rural river area. Upon arriving in the land of the Great Wall with his new team, Preston discovers that hunter Harker is also in the area. But Harker is looking to bag and tag this baby, not capture it for science. Who will get to the creature first? The keeper or the killer? And that's... kind of it.

Most of what occurs in LEGENDARY is characters standing around jawing bad dialog at each other and staring at animal tracks. Remember the "red shirts" in the old Star Trek episodes? The faceless crew members that the minute they beamed down they may as well have had "walking corpse" tattooed on their forehead? There are quite a few of these individuals running around in LEGENDARY. Every few minutes one of them gets killed by our titular beast and dragged off for the reptilian version of buffalo wings night in the creature's cave.

Adkins has a poorly written romance written in for him with a Chinese woman that's so utterly lame that it is abandoned before the three-quarters mark. Dolph isn't in the movie nearly enough but he has some choice macho dialog and looks great in his hunter gear. Adkins fares poorly due to bad writing which is a shame. He's a solid action star and good actor as can be seen in his UNIVERSAL SOLDIER films. But his character here is a goody-two-shoes and there isn't anything for him to grab on to with the character to drag it out of the painfully earnest dungeon.

What really sinks this thing in the end is the TERRIBLE cgi and PG-13 sensibility. The monster is painfully fake and not funny fake like the sharks in JERSEY SHORE SHARK ATTACK. Some juicy gore might have livened this up a bit but it isn't here. The attack sequences are just rote and dumb and staggeringly unconvincing. The Chinese actors are at least allowed to speak in their native tongue with interpreters translating so I'll give LEGENDARY this - it avoids awful dubbing. The climax is limp and predictable.

Video/Audio/Extras:

LEGENDARY has an unremarkably decent standard def transfer here in 2.39.1 anamorphic widescreen. As a recent digital production it looks exactly like one would expect. Color and detail is fine, no compression artifacts are visible and black levels are A-ok. The film was shot in 3-D but only the 2-D version is present on this disc.

The Dolby Digital 5.1 surround track utilizes decent LFE effects and keeps the dialog centered and clear and the gunshots crisp. The surround aspect is moderately aggressive but well handled overall. English subs are included as well.

The main extra is a fifteen minute making of documentary where we get a decent overall look at the production and some interesting stuff regarding the Chinese locations. Adkins and Lundgren also each get a short interview piece that's entertaining enough. Finally the film's trailer is included along with some other Lionsgate property trailers.

The Final Word:

LEGENDARY is pretty weak sauce. As an action film it suffers from testicular cancer. As a family adventure flick it isn't all that fun and the lousy cgi doesn't help. Dolph is fun but not in it enough, Adkins is torpedoed by a piss-poor script, and the film's climax is drab.

Skip this one.