If God Will Send His Agents (At A Snail's Pace)

I was originally inclined towards giving Legion a bad review, on the grounds that it's a lunatic mess of a film; amusing when it thinks it's scary, irritating when it thinks it's touching, and confusing when it thinks it's, well, anything else.

On reflection, though, I think I'm being unfair. Legion only fails if you assume it was intended to be a piece of entertainment. Not an unrealistic proposition, I grant you. In Legion's case, though, it fails to convince. The only way to make any sense from the film at all is to work from the assumption that it's some kind of twisted experiment to discover exactly how much an audience can take before they break.

How else can we explain a film so totally devoid of internal logic. A film which relies entirely on the idea that it will take an archangel quite some time to fly to Earth before contradicting that ten minutes later in any case. A film in which an army can trap the woman they want dead in a remote diner next to a gas station and never think to blow it up which is exactly what happens at the end anyway. An army, by the way, that sends an old woman as advance guard to ruin the element of surprise and then a man in an ice-cream van forty seconds ahead of the horde because, well, why exactly? The other angels thought he was a dick, I guess? Why does it take them the whole film to take over one diner patron when they can possess a cop in just enough time to rip off The Matrix and Twin Peaks at the same time?

I don't even want to talk about Gabriel's rotating tin angelo-cock substitute.

So, don't see it as a film. See it as a noble sacrifice. Dozens of careers brutally ended to allow each and every one of us our own break-point. It might be watching an old woman climbing across the ceiling. It might be watching a man get crucified upside down by angels. It might even be realising that this is a film released this year in which the two black characters are "bad boy" and "God fearer" (naturally, the latter has to have a heart to heart with the former to encourage him to repent) and the three female characters are a teenager and pregnant child who need to be protected, and a shrew of a woman who turns out to be crazy/evil. Who can say?