Opening this weekend and continuing the Hollywood tradition of casting African Americans as two-dimensional characters who are among the first to die in a body-count flick, Legion stars Tyrese Gibson as a heat-packing good guy with a past and Charles S. Dutton as a short-order cook who knows his Bible well enough to doubt the movie’s premise that God is exterminating humanity out of frustration.
Also opening this weekend: The Tooth Fairy, a feel-good charmer starring Dwayne Johnson as a hockey player on a heavenly assignment; and Soundtrack for a Revolution (limited release), starring John Legend, Wyclef Jean and Harry Belafonte in a soul-stirrer that tells the story of the civil rights movement through its freedom songs.
In Legion, Tyrese plays a sensitive antihero who drops in on what turns out to be humanity’s last stand against a wrathful God and ends up sacrificing himself to save a child that turns out to be a decoy for an ambush. His character makes it deeper into the movie than Dutton’s, who is the second to drop and who has arguably the best moment in the movie’s best scene, beaning an elderly woman-turned-demon with a skillet hurled from across the room just as she’s about to ice Lucas Black.
Of the three films, The Rock in a tutu probably stands the best chance of unseating The Book of Eli ($32.8 million) from its No. 2 position behind box-office juggernaut Avatar ($42.8 million last weekend; $504.9 million total gross). And The Blind Side ($228.2 million) will probably fall out of the Top 10 this weekend after being there for nine weeks.
An interesting side note: Legion star Paul Bettany is also the star of Creation, opening this weekend in limited release — so that in a single opening weekend, Bettany finds himself playing both Charles Darwin and the Archangel Michael. Not that God and Darwin need to be mutually exclusive; they’re just typecast that way. –lance helms
