I had every intention of catching up with both Richard Matheson’s 1954 source novel and its two previous screen incarnations (1964’s The Last Man on Earth and 1971’s The Omega Man), but it was a case of “the best laid plans of mice and men” and all that, so I’ll have to take this new version on its own merits. Will Smith is excellent as the only survivor of a human-made plague; like Tom Hanks, he can command the screen while talking with inanimate objects, and the film’s big death scene, which plays entirely as a close-up of Smith’s anguished face, is genuinely devastating. The film’s other major star—the shots of deserted New York City, shorn of its soul—are uncannily effective. But then bad CGI takes over the movie, as well as the mainstream-enforced impulse to give it an uplifting ending (cf. with Frank Darabont’s The Mist), and it starts to go down the tube. (Hollywood Jewel 16, Waco, TX)