The Book Of Eli Review

Warning! Spoilers!

In the growing popularity of post-Armageddon films to come from Hollywood, there has to be a gimmick, a twist to the tale to make another version seem more original. In the case of The Book Of Eli, this gimmick is certainly a clever, if slightly predictable one. Sadly the rest of the film, save for one or two moments of potential brilliance, does not live up to the expectations that you may have after watching the trailer or seeing the cast list.

Eli (Denzel Washington) walks the land of ruined America, armed only with a very large machete and a backpack containing, among other things, the only surviving copy of the King James Bible. He is heading west; a voice has told him he will find the place for the book there. Along the dangerous path, he walks through a town ruled by Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a cruel dictator type who, like Eli, knows of the power of the words in his book and wants then for himself...

There's no denying the anticipation one feels about a film starring Washington and Oldman, two heavyweight actors - sadly, it feels for a lot of the time that they're sleepwalking the parts, that this is just another day job for them. Substantially better is Mila Kunis in the role of Solara, the young girl who joins Eli on his journey. Having only heard Kunis in Family Guy as the put-upon Meg, and seen her in That 70s Show, it is probably going a little too far to describe her performance as a revelation (no pun intended), but it is still more impressive than the two leading men. The film is also enlightened by brief but hilariously strange cameos from Michael Gambon and Frances de la Tour as two deranged survivors living on a farmhouse packed to the brim with automatic weapons.

When the action happens it is fast but far between. The scenes are played out well, with plenty of gunfire and explosions and even in a couple of cases decapitations to keep an action buff happy. But the scenes are sandwiched in to a script that relies heavily on deep, meaningful, and often somewhat preachy dialogue about the nature of the Bible and words. Though there are a couple of rather excellent twists towards the end, it is marred by a rather strange final ending which seems to want to evoke the final scenes of the excellent Aronofsky film The Fountain (2006), but fail sadly.

There will probably be many people who go to see this film and are surprised at just how religious it actually is. Perhaps that was not the true intention of the film's directors, the Hughes brothers, whose last film was (ironically) the adaptation of the graphic novel From Hell (2001); perhaps what they are trying to do is to look at what we look to for hope when there seems to be absolutely none left, and how powerful inspirational words can be. Unfortuatley, their reliance on the Bible squashes these intentions, and I think a lot of people will leave the film very disappointed.

6/10