50x3: Legend (A-2)

Let me say if I were to grade the first portion of this movie, it may have been a lot worse. I was so confused.

So, for the second film on Aimee's list I watched Legend. From what I can tell the only thing keeping the light in the world is the magical unicorn. Over time there are now only two unicorns remaining and Darkness (Tim Curry) has sent out his goblins to destroy it.

Princess Lili (Mia Sara) heads out into the woods to meet her jungle friend Jack (Tom Cruise), who is teaching her the languages of the animals. Jack takes her and shows her the unicorns, but Lili does something forbidden - she touches the unicorn.

The goblins use this time to shoot a poisoned dart that kills the unicorn, leaving the planet with just one unicorn to keep the light and keep out the darkness.

Lili and the final unicorn are captured and taken to the underworld with Darkness. He intends to make Lili his queen and kill the final unicorn together - then take over the world.

Jack, meanwhile, cannot find Lili and stumbles across Gump (David Bennett), an elf, two dwarves Screwball (Cork Hubbert) and Brown Tom (Billy Barty) and the fairy Oona (Annabelle Lanyon) who all decide to help him conquer Darkness.

Pretty quick synopsis, but the film itself is only 90 minutes and with as much that is going on really has a pretty simple plot.

As I said before, the beginning of the film could have frightened me off. It hits you right in the face with its oddity and is rather confusing. If I had stumbled upon this one night and hadn't had it on my 50 list to watch I may have decided to skip the rest of the film. But, I am glad I watched the rest because it got a lot better.

The dwarves were pretty funny and Gump was definitely interesting. He looked child like and sounded like an older person (found out that he was voiced by someone else).

The weirdest part though may have been seeing the very young Cruise. Apparently he was younger in Risky Business but he looks so much younger here.

By the way, what the heck ever happened to Sara? With this and Ferris Bueller's Day Off under her belt shouldn't she have been a little bigger? Instead pretty much all of her co-stars had much bigger careers than she did.

As for the movie, I believe had I watched it in the 80s I would like it much more, but for what it is now I did enjoy it. Curry was almost unrecognizable as Darkness - the only characteristic that you can truly make out was his voice.

Grade: