Screen Gems

Paul Bettany and Adrianne Palicki star in "Legion."

Tickets to "Legion" ought to come with a warning label: May Be Hazardous to Your Intelligence!

Saying it's a decent movie is like saying Pat Robertson is a paragon of enlightenment. In fact, the good preacher would probably like this end-of-the-world scenario with its goofy slant on God and his army of angels.

Freshman director and co-writer Scott Stewart makes his lack of experience painfully apparent. When all hell isn't breaking loose, the characters exchange banalities with one another while the world is going to pieces around them. On the plus side, there are some really unintentionally funny moments. Another advisory should be attached: Best Seen on Video with a Six-Pack and a Pizza.

The setting is a seedy diner in the Mojave Desert called Paradise Falls. The owner is Bob, an embittered, divorced entrepreneur with incredibly bad business judgment played by Dennis Quaid. Usually dependable, Quaid puts more ham into the role than he does in his soup beans simmering on the gas grill.

Son Jeep (Lucas Black) is a downwardly mobile kind of guy stuck in the outback. He doesn't mind because he's in love with Charlie the waitress. She's played by Adrianne Palicki, one of the shining stars of TV's "Friday Night Lights," and she's what all the trouble is about. She's pregnant with another man's child but Jeep doesn't care.

It seems that God is once again angry over mankind and its wicked ways. He sends his minions down this time around to destroy his wayward children by inhabiting their bodies and killing the rest off. These angels, who are more like demons, can do all kinds of cool things like skittering across ceilings and growing shark teeth.

Enter the movie's profound theological thrust. The angel Michael (Paul Bettany) was appointed to lead the destruction -- and to specifically destroy Charlie's baby who, according to the daft script, is mankind's only hope. Why? We don't know. The movie tries to develop a messianic connection but fails miserably.

Charlie makes clear that this is not going to be a virginal birth between puffing on cigarettes and flirting with the customers. Meanwhile, Michael turns on his disgruntled boss and decides to rescue mankind.

Bettany turns Michael into a celestial Rambo. Michael's got prison tats and he arms the denizens of the diner with an arsenal of automatic weapons so they can blow the heads off the "Night of the Living Dead" catatonics who descend on the greasy spoon.

Why bullets are effective against supernatural beings who can fly and run around ceilings is never explained. Why angels all drive clunkers that get blown up is a further mystery. Actually, no. Budget, budget, budget.

About the best thing you can say about this hair-brained enterprise is that the effects and the action are occasionally interesting. Little old ladies turning into homicidal monsters, winged smack-downs between angels, an ice cream man who transforms himself into a human spider.

This newest action-thriller's take on that old time religion makes the severely flawed "The Book of Eli" look like the Sistine Chapel.