Urban Legend Movie Review:


After the smash hit 'Scream', Hollywood fat cats were bound to start cashing in on teenage slash pics, and Urban Legend, from Sony Pictures, was the third in line. As would be expected from a carbon copy, the attempts at comic irony are lazy and the characters have none of the charm nor innocence that Sarah Michelle Gellar and Jennifer Love Hewitt had in 'I Know What You Did Last Summer'.

Despite several flaws however, it is a good effort by all means and the finished product is polished and professional. An energetic and stylish production ensure that the effective backdrops to certain scenes and well worked out chase sequences keep the viewer interested and occasionally in suspense. It is no surprise then, that it smashed the box office and hit the number one spot. It IS, no matter how many flaws it has, a teenage crowd pleaser.

This brings me onto the minus points, and trust me, there are a lot of them. It's a wholly unbelievable movie. Who, on planet earth, could believe that a seemingly fragile young gal could survive being shot, falling from about five storeys, and almost being drowned. If you can believe this, then you won't be surrprised by some impossibly lucky execution scenes, notably the hanging from a tree episode. Apart from this though, and a below-par script, I can't really see any other problems with this film. The idea of a killer stomping around a campus basing his murders on urban legends is a good one and is well executed - no pun intended, first-time director Jamie Blanks has used a certain worksmanship style in this movie in which everything falls into place and nothing is muddled - she falls off the stairs, he dies in the car crash, they see the body in the trunk. It is all so incredibly easy to understand, so easy in fact, that a five year old could understand it, which probably explains why this was such a hit with teens across the U S of A.

I liked this movie essentially because it was intended as carnage candy and IS so, pure popcorn entertainment.

Simon Savory

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