Review for Legendary

Legendary is possibly the most disappointing film I've seen in a long time. The reason? The trailer. I watched the trailer and thought 'Wow! That looks like a powerful film. And it's made by WWE? They are really taking a risk with this film and so it must be great!' I'm not a fan of John Cena and hadn't even heard of Patricia Clarkson despite the 'Oscar-Nominee' thing they keep throwing around, but I was really sold on the story.

So what went wrong?

Legendary tells the story of Cal Chetley (Devon Graye), a geeky weakling who decides to join the wrestling team in school. There is actually no reason for this other than his brother and father were both past legends. His father has died and for some reason (again it is never explained) his brother Mike (John Cena) has not seen him or his mother (Clarkson) for almost a decade. Upon joining the team, he finds that he is awful, being beaten again and again. He decides to track down his brother (which he does with ease and with no explanation) and tries to get him to train him. Mike trains his brother and soon he begins winning matches and this goes someway to reuniting the family.

It seems like your typical plot and one I've seen a number of times and I think the problem with this film is that it's just not very good. The acting is fine in general, Danny Glover does his best Morgan Freeman impression and the rest work with what they have. Cena is good, but as he admits in the documentary, he has no formal amateur wrestling experience and so the scenes with him teaching Cal are awkward. If this had been Kurt Angle (former WWE wrestler and Olympic Champion) it would have made more sense, but here it just looked wrong. The actual film is far too long and a lot of the emotional scenes were just flat. I'm not sure why this is, but I just could not connect with any of the characters and most importantly I could not care for them either.

Legendary is not a great film, but it's not a bad film. After watching, it reminded me of when I first saw The Phantom Menace, all I could think was 'It should have been much better than that'. Sadly, this film is anything but legendary!