The Book of Eli (2010, The Hughes Brothers)

The Book of Eli looks fantastic. If there's one thing the Hughes brothers excel at, it's their sense of visual style. They can frame a shot with the best of them; and there's nothing like a post-apocalyptic landscape to provide some great cinematic opportunities. You also can't ask for a pair of better, more watchable actors than Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman.

Some of what this film suffers from is bad timing. It's essentially treading very similar ground to The Road, but the two films aren't even in the same league. The Road is a poetic, beautiful, haunting, expertly-crafted meditation on love and grief; by comparison The Book of Eli is stereotypical Hollywood schlock. And as good an actor as Denzel Washington may be, again his portrayal here can not touch the nuanced, emotion-wrecked naturalism of Viggo Mortensen's performance in The Road. Finally, after the grim, gritty, harsh reality of that film, everything that happens in Eli is laughable and sanitized.

Another part of what The Book of Eli suffers from is poor set and costume design. Mila Kunis actually turns in a fairly honest performance, but the scenes of her trekking across the desert wasteland like she's sporting Ray Bans in a Gap ad while modeling what appears to be the new fall line absolutely kills any kind of authenticity. She just doesn't have the look of someone who's been ravaged and world-worn.

Once you throw some of the credibility out of the window, what's left is a high-concept Hollywood-ized neo-Western. In that sense the film succeeds, and is relatively entertaining. But it's a shame to see actors like Washington and Oldman lending their credibility and having to swim upstream to make this into a workable B movie. There's also a twisty revelation at the end of the film which will probably come as a surprise to audiences, but which is unnecessary and doesn't add much to the proceedings, as revelatory as its intended to be.

Sure there's some mileage to be gotten from the plot hook of Oldman's character searching for a Bible as a means to lead (i.e. manipulate) the mostly-illiterate sheep in this post-apocalyptic world, but it's nothing that hasn't been tread before in things the likes of Showtime's mediocre series Jeremiah, starring Luke Perry. And the seeming set-up for a straight-to-DVD sequel starring Kunis' character doesn't help regain credibility, either.

7/10