The Hughes Brothers (Menace II Society, From Hell) are back with a post-apocalypse Western starring Denzel Washington (Training Day, Inside Man). Sadly despite much anticipation, The Book of Eli is a mess of miscasting and quasi-Christian preaching, which even the impressive visuals cannot save.
Eli (Washington) is a lone traveller in a world thirty years on from a catastrophic war. Marauding gangs and conmen haunt the roads, but Eli is focused on a mysterious goal, heading West. Eli is the owner of the last Bible on Earth.
When Eli happens upon a small settlement, he catches the attention of Carnegie, (Gary Oldman, The Dark Knight) who rules the town as a dictator (subtly emphasised by the character’s introduction where he is reading a Mussolini biography). Carnegie is desperate to get his hands on a Bible, believing that the book will allow him to expand his control. He tries to tempt Eli with power and Solara (Mila Kunis, Forgetting Sarah Marshall), but the sword-wielding traveller rejects these rewards and high-tails it out of town with the book and the girl.
Washington’s charisma on screen as the reluctant hero isn’t enough to diminish the film’s scripting problems. Something Oldman seems to have figured out early on, so he just rings in previous power-mad performances like Stansfield from Léon (1994) and Jean-Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg from The Fifth Element (1997). Kunis is badly miscast as the innocent Solara, whose story arc into road warrior is so poorly developed that the transformation is competely unbelievable.
Read the full review at Trespass
