Legend

Directed by Ridley Scott

At the USA Charles

AT THE BEGINNING of Legend, the king of the wood elves tells Jack, the forest boy (Tom Cruise): "You can't expect to disrupt the order of the universe and not pay the price." The "price" here refers to the rest of the movie, a slipshod amalgamation of trolls, witches, ugly bat-like things and one-eyed executioner types that belong in pro wrestling. Sad to say, Legend is too high a price for even the fantasy flick lover to pay.

As the title implies, this movie is a generic myth constructed from a whole slew of great tales of yesterday, you, far away and thither. Playing on an anticipation of the viewer's weak memory, Legend offers us a couple of migrant dwarves straight from Middle Earth, a little-used golden sword on loan from King Arthur, a satanic but tender-hearted Evil (Tim Curry) lifted from Goethe, an outdoorsy-type hero borrowed from Edgar Rice Borroughs (Cruise), a couple of white unicorns stolen from the planet of Pern and a fairy queen cloned from Tinkerbell. Now, 'tis true that no one story or author has a copyright on Good and Evil, but it is definitely a tired plot which leaves the viewer expecting Frodo to walk in at any moment.

This story, like many others in the genre, begins because someone's curiosity has screwed up the natural order of things. In case we are not familiar with that order, four paragraphs flash across the screen a la Star Wars and inform us that the universe is a balance between GOOD and EVIL, two constituent parties which hold each other in check. Anything which musses up this cosmic tidiness must therefore be swept under the divine carpet before the universe is destroyed.

Enter the hero. As a gesture of friendship, Jack takes his princess girlfriend Lilly (Mia Sara) to see a pair of mystic unicorns, the keepers of the light of the universe without which the sun could not rise. As usual in this sort of drama, it's the girl who gets the plot going. Intoxicated by the beauty-and muscularity?--of these beasts, Lilly unwittingly leads them into a trap set by one of Evil's assistants. One unicorn down, one to go. And the cosmic order has officially been screwed up.

NATURALLY, JACK FEELS pretty awful about the whole thing, seeing as it was his fault that Lilly ever got to touch the now stiffening unicorn in the first place. So with the help of a somewhat lustful fairy queen, the forest knave acquires the requisite set of used armor and hauls his butt over to a humungous oak tree, which serves as Evil's headquarters. His main goal is to save his girlfriend and the last remaining unicorn in the universe, both of which have been captured by the forces of darkness. If he fails, the sun will never rise again and he will most certainly never get laid.

The rest of Legend, about an hour, is spent on the mundane but difficult tasks of climbing out of dungeons, scaling huge walls, crossing pirahna-infested moats and busting through magic doors. There is a climactic battle between Jack and Evil at the end, in which one of them wins and the other goes spinning off into an infinite void--you can guess who gets the girl and who gets the shaft.

Anyway, the problem with Legend is not that the plot is stupid--all fantasy movie plots are stupid--but that the characters are not even slightly interesting. In the best GOOD versus EVIL films, the hero and accompanying crew will have a sense of humour about what they are doing. They will have blemishes, character defects and haunting memories which motivate them. Jack has nothing but a pretty face and a set of isometrically honed forearms. Similarly, Lilly does not even have a trace of the independent bitchiness of Princess Leia, one of the few cinematic fantasy heroines that had a modicum of actual character. Although she does play a role in the plot's eventual outcome, she smiles blandly all the way through, pausing only to scream at the appropriate moments: Suzanne Somers as defender of the universe.

Still, Legend might make a nice outing for kids. There's no sex or cursing, and the inevitable violence is done in soothing pastels with no major fatalities. The photography is quite lavish: the first half hour of the film gets by simply because the viewer is visually stunned. The special effects too are surprisingly tasteful, with the distorted faces of Evil's henchmen done with realism and restraint. Legend would probably be able to scare the average eight-year-old without producing traumatic night-mares.

So take the kids. But while they're watching and hoping that the order of the universe gets realigned, you might want to skip out to get a bite to eat or to get the car fixed or to update your insurance policies. In Legend, matters of Good and Evil just aren't for adults.