If I felt that Legend needed to be defended, I would try to bend my mind around the right way to recommend the film for its visuals, while ignoring its crippling flaws. However, although Legend bombed at the box office, it has gained a cult following on video and those passionate fans of the film appear to be the people who have reviewed it on Epinions. Thus, I'm not going to feel bad about going with my gut here. As great as Legend is to look at, I have no interest in ever seeing it again. While people who need encouragement to see the film will get ample reinforcement from reading the reviews here, I'm not going to feel bad about offering a negative view.

Taken frame-for-frame, Legend may be one of the most lavishly designed movies of the past twenty years. The film benefits from being produced just before the beginning of the digital age. The mix of soundstage sets and occasional location shooting is marvelous. And the new DVD "Ultimate Edition" offers a sterling print of the film that will make any fan happy. On the other hand, the Legend:Director's Cut, despite the restoration of ten extra minutes, does little to correct the fact that the film is only a mediocre fairy tale, doing nothing to stir up the traditional formula and lacking the complexity of the best of the wondertales from which it borrows freely. Basically, this expanded version of Legend may be an improvement on the butchered original that American audiences got to see, but it probably won't dramatically change anybody's opinion of the movie. If you liked the first cut, you'll probably be happier, but if you hated it (as some people did) you won't have a new favorite movie.

[It should be noted that I'm not sure that I've seen the American cut of Legend since I was a wee lad, so I'm not going to be able to tell you which scenes have been lengthened and which scenes are totally fresh. Watching the Director's Cut, felt totally fresh to me, for better or for worse.]

Like any good fairy tale, Legend takes place in a far away kingdom populated by goblins, sprites, faeries, and other mystical creatures. In this kingdom lived a beautiful princess named Lily (Mia Sara) who loves the common people more than she loves her powerful station. She also loves Jack (Tom Cruise), whose actual origins I can't really understand. Is he entirely human? He's a bit too much like Tarzan for my tastes and his background is never really explained. But anyway, they love each other. And as a gesture of love, Jack takes Lily to see the unicorns. Little do they know that down in the Underworld, Darkness (Tim Curry) is plotting with a bunch of evil creatures to end the rule of light on earth and to help darkness reclaim the Earth (because, of course, in the beginning, there was darkness). It seems that unicorns are the purest of creatures and only their death can allow Darkness to reign supreme. When the goblin creatures kidnap Lily, Jack, with the help of a variety of good Little Folk must become the champion of goodness and life.

The story is credited as an original script to William Hjortsburg (who also got credit for rewriting Faust as Angel Heart), but its influences are all over. Beauty and the Beast is the most obvious (and in the DVD's director's commentary, Scott readily admits that Cocteau's classic La Belle et la bete was a primary narrative and visual determinant on his film). The story moves into Greek mythology as well and the story of Hades's kidnapping of Persephone and their marriage. Legend also borrows from Hidden Fortress by way of Star Wars. And then there are countless references to Disney's interpretation of fairy tales. Basically, Legend is an amalgam of any number of classic tales and very little of it has any freshness. That need not be a bad thing. It's comforting and comfortable storytelling. The vast majority of fairy tales were basically spin-offs of other fairy tales anyway. It's difficult to find the "fairy tale sui generis," so I'd really rather not make this into a primary complaint about the film. Fairy tales were an oral narrative form and as such evolved from other oral narrative traditions. Ridley Scott and William Hjortsburg are, I guess, entitled to merely coast further on this tradition.

It would be doing Legend a disservice not to give full credit to the individuals who were in charge of the various visual aspects of the film. Rob Bottin was in charge of the make-up and created funny dwarves (sometimes just with pointy ears and sometimes with extensive prosthetics) and nasty evil creatures. His greatest achievement is with Tim Curry's Darkness, who is truly a bad mutha. Production designers Assheton Gorton and Leslie Dilley transformed London's Pinewood Studios (home of 007) into a beautiful kingdom of forests, streams, and dark grottos. And capturing all of this is cinematographer Alex Thomson. Thomson was on familiar ground, having shot John Boorman's Excalibur four years earlier. All of these craftsmen helped realize Ridley Scott's nearly-operatic vision. Certain moments of beauty just linger in the mind long after the movie ends. I especially like the whirlwind of petals that engulf the evil goblins as they kidnap Lily. And then there's the film's best moment, a sequence in which Lily dances in the Underworld with a figure who may or may not be her doppelganger. Once again, I will observe that even though I'm not recommending this movie to everybody, if you're a student of the visual image, yes, you probably should see Legend. It's an excellent example of how the fantasy genre is supposed to look.

The problem, for me at least, is how little I actually *felt* while watching this movie. The romantic elements are doomed by the general lack of chemistry between Cruise and Sara, while the action elements are doomed by the fact that none of them add up to anything. The fairy tale structure requires an escalation of adventure and tensions through which the hero gains experience, knowledge, and bravery. Legend does fine with the latter elements. Cruise begins the film as an innocent and his heroism does increase. However, the film spends much too much time on early exposition and not nearly enough time on the adventure later on. Cruises challenges don't really build, so Legend's epic feel never totally materializes. I don't have a problem personally with the cloying sweetness or moralizing that occurs, since I see how that fits in with the genre, but I can see how you might find it annoying if you weren't predisposed to that kind of thing.

The acting ranges in quality from middling to obscured by make-up. For example, is Tim Curry remarkable as Darkness? Or is the make-up remarkable? The character makes a powerful impression, but does any of that have to do with the actor inside the make-up? I'm not certain. Then there's the mystery of David Bennent, as the sprite/elf/thing Honeythorn Gump, who astute film fans will recognize from The Tin Drum, even though his dialogue was all redubbed. And while the ADR is OK, it's still obvious. So you watch and wonder what percentage of the performance comes from the actor and what percentage comes from the appropriately eerie disconnect between actor and voice. Among the "little people," the legendary Billy Barty stands out, but largely because of his prominence in the opening credits.

The two leads are basically very attractive and somewhat bland. Only when he occasionally flashes that toothy grin do you get any indication at all that Tom Cruise was in the process of becoming the biggest star in the land. Ridley Scott's brother Tony would make much better use of Cruise the next year in Top Gun. Legend helps you appreciate just how much of Cruise's star image is tied to his swagger and just how dull he can be when he's trying to act unsure of himself. Also, his flat line-readings undermine the film's wildly poetic script. Sara is lovely, but she also was an actress whose appeal came from spunkiness. This was her first film. She was much better in her next film, Ferris Bueller's Day Off. But she is much better off than Cruise in this film. Her scenes with Darkness are terrific and she has that great dance number that I mentioned.

Your eagerness to accept Legend will probably depend on your desperation of a good piece of fantasy cinema. This isn't it. Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring came far closer. But compare Legend to its fantasy contemporaries. It's better than The Dark Crystal or Labyrinth. Those two films are watchable now only if you have a ton of nostalgia for the films you loved in your youth. The cinematic beauty of Legend remains intact, as do all of its story problems. I was mostly bored, but some people just get swept away by this movie.

Oh, and I should note that Jerry Goldsmith's score, which went with the film everywhere but the United States is far superior to the Tangerine Dream score that American audiences were stuck with. The new score is part of why the film retains whatever freshness it still has.

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12