Urban Legend

Directed by Jamie Blanks, Urban Legend follows several college students, including Alicia Witt’s Natalie, Jared Leto’s Paul, and Joshua Jackson’s Damon, as they’re pursued by an urban-legend-inspired serial killer. Filmmaker Blanks, working from Silvio Horta’s screenplay, delivers a perpetually generic slasher that fares best in its familiar yet entertaining opening stretch, as the movie benefits substantially from a smattering of compelling kill sequences and its charismatic performances – with, in terms of the latter, Blanks eliciting loose, engaging work from a cast that also includes Michael Rosenbaum, Rebecca Gayheart, and Robert Englund. It’s clear, then, that Urban Legend slowly-but-surely begins its transformation into a distressingly tedious piece of work as it enters its padded-out midsection, and there’s little doubt, as well, that the progressively underwhelming vibe is compounded by a relatively interminable third act – as the picture, past a certain point, contains one scene too many of the surviving protagonists running and screaming from the killer. The somewhat nifty twist ending ensures that Urban Legend concludes on a comparatively decent note, admittedly, but it’s not even remotely enough to compensate for the wildly erratic bent of its second half.

** out of ****