Marvel Star's Forgotten 100-Minute Action Thriller Is About to Disappear From Streaming

Biblically accurate Vision

There's a particular sort of movie that's fallen out of style in the 2020s, as the film industry has pivoted to a sort of feast-or-famine style for theatrical distribution. Currently, anything that gets a run on the big screen is either a blockbuster with a nine-digit budget or an indie production. It's either The Odyssey or Backrooms, with nothing in between.

Movie theaters used to have a well-established middle ground, which was the traditional domain of comedies, higher-concept thrillers, and occasionally action movies. These weren't meant to be the [genre] event of the summer, Oscar bait, or a billion-dollar cultural event. Instead, they were workhorse midcarders, here to entertain you for an evening, then go on to a respectable existence as something you'd catch on cable or an airplane now and again.

Legion, a Biblically-themed zombie-ish action/horror movie starring Paul Bettany as a heavily-armed archangel, is a perfect example. With Bettany's star on the rise following the announcement of the forthcoming VisionQuest series on Disney Plus, now's a good time to dip back into the weirder side of his filmography, but you'll have to act fast. 2010's Legion is leaving Netflix on Aug. 31.

The better angels of our nature

Legion, not to be confused with the 2017 TV show, begins with the archangel Michael (Bettany) falling to Earth in downtown Los Angeles. He cuts off his own wings, raids a local warehouse for all the guns he can carry, then steals a police car. As one does.

Meanwhile, Charlie (Adrianne Palicki, Friday Night Lights) is a waitress at a rapidly failing diner halfway between Las Vegas and LA. She's also eight months pregnant by a boyfriend who ran out on her. That's already giving Charlie enough problems before one of the diner's patrons gets demonically possessed and tries to kill her.

Michael shows up shortly afterward to arm the people in the diner and explain what's going on. The End of Days has arrived, and Charlie's unborn baby is destined to be humanity's next savior. Michael has gone rogue from heaven in order to protect the child from the hordes of possessed humans that are about to besiege the diner.

As noted above, Legion has a lot in common with zombie movies, but it takes full advantage of its Biblical inspirations to throw in some big moments and occasional gross-outs. There's one sequence involving a massive cloud of insects, placed around the diner's perimeter to prevent escape, that's easily one of the most memorable scenes in the movie.

Legion's also a useful example of a film that's elevated by its cast. Even at the time it was made, you'd expect the people at the diner to be played by no-names and newcomers, as most of them are simply here to get murdered. Instead, Legion features a solid lineup of recognizable faces, including Dennis Quaid, Tyrese Gibson, Charles Dutton, and a pre-Arrow Willa Holland. That helps to elevate the material from what could've been a simple shoot-'em-up to a genuinely tense snapshot of the end of the world.

Legion was worked over by critics, but still made some money at the box office. As a result, it led to a 2014 TV spinoff, Dominion, that lasted two seasons on the Syfy Network.

Even so, Legion has more or less been forgotten, particularly as it's a sort of film that's fallen out of vogue. It's a little too intense and gross to make for good prime-time cable fare, but you can't really call it horror in the traditional sense, but its supernatural theme and Biblical murder sprees are a little too much to call it a simple action movie. Legion sits at the intersection point of a lot of different venn diagrams, so it doesn't cleanly fit in anywhere. That might explain how it’s managed to drop off of filmgoers’ radar.

You can't realistically call Legion any kind of lost classic. It arguably does qualify as a sleeper hit, however, and it's worth a look if you've never seen it. It's just a decent way to kill a couple of hours, and sometimes, that's enough.

Legion is streaming on Netflix until Aug. 31.