Australian Penthouse

The Book Of Eli
Director: Allen & Albert Hughes
Stars: Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman, Mila Kunis,
Sony

In the beginning, there was The Word.

And so it is that The Book of Eli kneels before the power of The Word, the power of faith and scripture and the (wo)men who bear it.

That’s the idea, anyway — whether or not those lofty heights are actually achieved is going to come down to viewer priority.

Not much needs to be said about the plot of the film. It is your run-of-the-mill doomsday genre flick: world-weary endurance of a monochromatic world; ash in the sky, twisted bodies in the streets, death and barbarism around every corner.

Our hero, in this case a new world prophet named Eli (Denzel Washington), is trekking west towards an unknown sanctuary with humanity’s last copy of the Bible strapped to his back. Guided by faith alone, Eli avoids trouble where he can and dismembers its perpetrators when he must.

(For those gentle souls who sat through The Road wishing Viggo Mortensen would stop hiding, sack up and start busting heads, these moments of gore and glory will make your heart sing.)

At the same time, self-serving power broker Carnegie (Gary Oldman) is relentlessly deploying bikie terror squads to find and acquire an un-named book, certain it is the missing link to securing his position at the head of the post-apocalyptic chain of command.

Of course, Eli ends up in Carnegie’s ramshackle town and inadvertently reveals himself as being literate and blessed. It does not take long for the Evil Overlord to realise that the Righteous Man has what he needs and mark him as a reluctant target.

This struggle is, naturally, at the centre of the movie. And while the details of the good-versus-evil story may be formulaic, Oldman and Washington’s on-screen interplay is complex enough to keep things above board for much of the film’s duration.

But as the runtime winds down and the story wraps up, the leaps of faith the Hughes brothers ask of their audience become unsustainable, overwhelming even the combined power of the Oldman-Washington dream team to resurrect engagement.

That is the only real failing for The Book of Eli. The cast are all superb, the stylized aesthetics are exactly as they should be and the dialogue is compelling, but the story collapses on itself just as it should be solidifying.

Problems with logistical continuity and asymmetrical pacing (the story moves gradually, until suddenly everything is resolved) mean that nitpickers will find themselves either smirking or frowning. But everyone else will dismiss that as a minor complaint amongst an excess of solid, post-apocalyptic ass-kicking and prayer.