Another post-Apocalyptic tale of a weary, wasted wanderer in a colorless, featureless desert housing some colorless, featureless people, reminiscent of "The Road," "Mad Max" and others. This time Denzel Washington is the heroic, extra-taciturn Eli, who carries a large, extremely sharp knife and and an equally large book, reading one to justify what he is about to do with the other.
Twin brothers Albert and Allen Hughes, who have made a number of blood-soaked movies in the last decade, are responsible for this absurdity, repeating the cliches and the violence we've all seen far too much of. Eli is going "west," he says to those who ask, but he wants no companions on his journey. The knife and the book are enough.
But post-Apocalyptic stories are never that simple. Carnegie wants the book, maybe to add to the libraries founded by his ancestor Andrew, and Gary Oldman is willing to kill for it. Eli is the preferred target but anyone else will do. Tom Waits is part of the gang, Jennifer Beals is his girl friend, Mila Kunis her daughter, set up by Carnegie to distract Eli. A young and aspiring actress, Kunis is about as out of place as a stripper at a bris, with her white teeth gleaming through the dust and her hair perfectly coiffed almost all the time.
The brightest sequence in the movie involves Michael Gambon and Frances de la Tour, as an aging farm couple named George and Martha, perhaps a nod toward Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" They're lovely and charming until the machine gun fire begins.
Gary Whitta wrote the screenplay, using all the banality he's ever learned.
Of course, when Eli gets to the west coast and delivers the book, we learn, as we have known forever, it's the Bible, as obvious a revelation as learning that Mark McGwire took drugs. And since we also know that throughout history, the Bible has been a rationale for more wars, more killings, than any other single volume. Do we have to hear it again?
Opens today at several theaters
–Joe