After the attacks in New York on 11 September 2001, there was a common view that the immediacy of the rolling news coverage and the scale of the destruction would long render the disaster movie genre both obscene and obsolete. Sadly for cinema-goers, this consensus lasted about three years before Manhattan was subjected to freak weather conditions in Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow – the title probably referring to how long that wretched picture seemed to drag on for. I Am Legend has no tidal waves rushing down Broadway. Instead the city is utterly deserted, with crops growing in Times Square and lions hunting deer in the streets. It later emerges that a complacent British scientist (Emma Thompson) had created a cure for cancer which then had the unfortunate side-effect of killing most of mankind and turning nearly all the rest into cannibalistic zombies. Adding to the growing sense of incredulous disbelief, the good doctor’s original discovery is announced on the news as a mere afterthought following the baseball results.

Once again mankind has carelessly left its fate in the hands of Will Smith, playing an Army hero called Robert Neville who has remained on the now-quarantined island of Manhattan to find a cure. He has a Frankenstein lab complete with zombies strapped to gurneys in the basement of his grand house, in which he and his dog Sam barricade themselves at night and listen to the living dead getting up to no good outside. The problem is that the Gollum-like zombies are not remotely scary, which is all things considered a great handicap in a horror film. At times it looks as if a thousand Andrew Marr clones are running amok. Later on Sam is bitten by a zombie-hound and Neville is left friendless after despatching his once faithful pooch, the only scene which invokes a response from the audience because we are British (or in this Reading cinema mainly Polish, thus proving once again that the Daily Mail is talking out of its arse about immigration and integration) and that is what we do. At this point he gives up and picks a fight with the nocturnal predators; a pretty Brazilian woman and her son turn up to rescue him. It is never satisfactorily explained where they had come from and where they had been for the preceding three years, and indeed why their English was so perfect when just about everyone else has either long been eaten or is rampaging around as monosyllabic as Wayne Rooney.

Like trying to fall asleep in the depths of the countryside there is something unsettling about the disappearance of the background noise of everyday life, and it is here that this film holds its power. It’s not a bad film, all things considered; the special effects are great and it is at times quite unnerving. It just falls into the trap of being neither as scary nor as clever as it thinks it is. It is an intriguing update on the great New York disaster genre, its overbearing silence an original take on the chaos of films such as The Towering Inferno, but one that ultimately looks great and says nothing. Plus of course there’s nothing new to us Brits about city centres being overtaken at night by bellowing and violent creatures…