By Peter Covino

Entertainment Editor

Maybe the Hughes brothers (Albert and Allen) just couldn’t decide what kind of movie they wanted.
Is The Book of Eli this year’s Mad Max or is it a new incarnation of HBO’s western series Deadwood?
Either way, despite some good sets and some good intentions, this Denzel Washington film is mostly disappointing.



 

Set in a very bleak period in the not too distant future, Washington is Eli, a man who has been traveling the roads of a nuclear winter in America for years, feasting on the occasional cat and always wary of just who he might encounter on the road.

Almost everyone he meets  is of course, horribly bad. But that’s not a problem for Eli.  Denzel Washington could easily be confused with Wesley Snipes in Blade for his prowess with a knife as well as other martial arts skills as he mows down a dozen adversaries at a time.
If The Book of Eli had more of comic book feel to it, the brothers Hughes might get away with Eli’s superpower tendencies, but it almost borders on the ridiculous.

 Eli is not unlike Clint Eastwood in his early Sergio Leone films where Eastwood was the lone rider in lawless western towns. In keeping with that Leone western feel, more than once, one of the main characters (Ray Stevenson from HBO’s Rome) is heard whistling the theme song from Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America. Another nice touch that underlies the theme of the film is  a poster on the wall of one of Eli’s temporary lodgings — it’s from the 1970s classic post-nuclear war film, A Boy and His Dog.
But the Hughes brothers just don’t weave all of this into one cohesive story.

Eli’s book, is appropriately enough, and this really isn’t giving anything away, is the Bible. He has probably the last one in existence, and apparently guided by some kind of religious impulse (which also contributes apparently to his near super human powers), keeps heading west.

His biggest obstacle is Carnegie (Gary Oldman), the big man in the town of Carnegie. He finds out that Eli has a Bible, and knowing its power in the world before this last catastrophic war, he wants to use it to increase his own strength. Eli and Carnegie are the only two characters in the film who are old enough to remember how things were before the war.

When Eli refuses to surrender the book, Carnegie and his band of thugs give chase. It sets up the best scene in The Book of Eli. Eli, who is now accompanied by a young woman, who wants to escape from Carnegie, both the town and the man, come across a secluded farmhouse.
The old couple inside (Michael Gambon and Frances de la Tour) offer up some tea from their cracked china and music on a Victrola. There is only one drawback to the Norman Rockwell setting: their adaption to the current state of the world includes cannibalism.
It’s one of the few original scenes in Book of Eli, which mostly is a rehash of other superior, post-apocalypse films.

Critic's rating: C

Rated R for violence and language