The Book of Eli (2010) – on rental. There are a couple of actors in Hollywood today that are able to switch with relative ease between roles of opposite alignments. Most can’t. For instance, the one time when Arnuld Schwarzennegar took on the role of a villain, it turned into one of the worst film disasters ever that was the last nail on the coffin for the Batman movie franchise before Christopher Nolan revived it with Batman Begins. But one of the few who can is Denzel Washington, who’s played extremes from both ends of the spectrum and right down the middle too.
One of his two films for 2010 was released at the start of this year, and is titled The Book of Eli. The film is led by a directorial team comprising two brothers, the Hughes, and off a story by Gary Whitta, a well-known person for those of us in the games industry.
Their output is a film set in a post-apocalyptic world about a man, Eli (Washington), who believes he has been given the divine charge of taking the last remaining bible on earth westwards and across the continent of a war- and environmental-ravaged United States. His mission is anything but easy: the landscape has been burned nearly to a crisp by the sun as a result of what I’m guessing is the partial destruction of the ozone layer, and it’s dog-eat-dog among humans and literally (and I mean cannibalism here). And while there are human settlements where the last remnants of humanity gather and try to eke out a living, the settlements are ruled by iron-fisted warlords, one of whom is Carnegie (Gary Oldman) who wants this last copy of the bible for himself.
The film reminds me of a couple of other films based on similar themes. The clearest one is The Postman, one of two Kevin Costner films (the other being Waterworld) that cost a crazy amount of money to make but was a relative bomb at the box office. Like that film, the protagonist here – Eli – is an enigma, and his motivations and what his quest involves is never made clear until near the film’s midpoint. Moreover, like those two Costner films, the Book of Eli has big story ideas but terrible delivery. The audience is let to do with small bits of back story, and while by the film’s third quarter they roughly give a general idea of where this is all going, there are big, like humongously big story holes that don’t make any sense – and some of them are serious enough to impede your ability to fully immerse yourself in the film once you go past the attractive visuals.
[Spoilers]
Like for instance: that all the bibles in the world have been destroyed because the war that devastated the continent was a religious one allegedly caused by Christianity (and even this is never made very clear). Last I checked: there are a couple billion copies of the bible in circulation. For a film to claim that humans – being the routinely disunited and disagreeable bunch we are – could somehow all in unison band together to destroy all copies and somehow miss only one, is, honestly a fetch whichever side you choose to look.
Or how Eli, which at the end of the film is revealed to be blind, possesses those incredible fighting skills. You could get away with suggesting that a blind man could out-punch half a dozen other men if he was the Daredevil character possessing heightened use of his other senses but that kind of hypernatural ability is never really suggested in the film’s context. And there are even a couple of scenes involving precision archery that will leave you scratching your head why the film even gets into the realm of the superhero and fantastic when everywhere else it seems to ground itself in realism, post-apocalyptic world notwithstanding.
And the ending… just oh my. It takes place on The Rock, i.e. Alcatraz island, off a burnt-out San Francisco city. Even though this section has been marked ‘Spoiler’, I won’t say more besides this: your head will burst with pain along the lines of “WHAT THE…?!?!”
But if you could somehow just get past the hokey story, there’s still – surprisingly – plenty to enjoy in The Book of Eli. Denzel Washington turns in a great performance as a tormented Eli who has only one purpose in life, and as advised by the voice in his head: to take his bible westwards. Gary Oldman is, as always, fun to watch as the cunning but still half-psychotic villain hell bent on getting that bible, no matter the human cost.
The fight scenes are incredible too, and are free of the monkey-cam operation typical of Michael Bay or any of his admirers. You can actually follow the action here, and it exudes style that reminds me of the old Hong Kong kung-fu films before they unfortunately transformed into the wire-fu you commonly see today.
So, it comes down to what’s important for you. As a brain-dead way of spending about 2 hours of your time watching great action and acting performances, The Book of Eli meets expectations. Just leave your brain at the door-step, and don’t ask yourself too many questions at the film’s end.
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