Film Reviews: 'The Book of Eli'

REVIEW: ‘Book of Eli’ Delivers God, Guns, and Guts
by John Nolte
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/

“One day I heard this voice, like it was coming from inside me. It led me to a place… I found this book, buried deep in the rubble… And the voice told me to carry it west…”

Credit where credit is due… Hollywood is trying. Granted, six years have passed since “The Passion” proved we Christians can be convinced to return to a medium that has spent decades taking great pleasure in insulting who we are and what we believe; and with that clinical Christmas card of a follow up called “The Nativity” it seemed as though they would never figure it out. But between the unapologetic Christian “Blind Side” and now the down and dirty “Book of Eli,” there’s reason to hope the Pagans of the Pacific might have just moved a little closer to cracking our code.

“The Book of Eli” isn’t just Christian, it’s off-the-rails Christian … literally. Heathens might as well hit the lobby at the end of the second act because the final act is all about the faith. You’re more than welcome to stick around, but I have a feeling those of you with red strings tied ‘round your wrist will be checking your watch for the last twenty-minutes. Not we Bible-thumpers, though. That’s when it all comes together; and it’s moving and smart and best of all, not some hyper-reverent snoozer.

So, thanks Hollywood. Oh, I’ll be kicking your ass again in a sec, but for now… really, thanks.

The book is the King James Bible, it’s the last one, and its protector is Denzel Washington’s Eli, a man old enough to remember life during The Before, before the last war some thirty years ago. Ever since, through a post-apocalyptic America, he has made his way west, walking alone and honing his survival skills. Gangs of marauders with robbery on their mind are no safer than the few stray animals unfortunate enough to cross Eli when he needs a meal.

Eli doesn’t understand the how or why of his mission. He just knows what God has called him to do, and in a touching act of faith has spent three decades of suffering and sacrifice to fulfill and complete something he instinctively understands is more important than himself — three decades of trudging through a desolate, colorless desert landscape where water is more precious than gold and cannibals are a constant threat. Like the book he carries, Eli is part Old Testament and New: Part Job, part St. Paul.
Carnegie (Gary Oldman) is a character right out of those great Westerns where one ruthlessly ambitious man runs a dusty old town and orders about a gang of gunslingers who cater to his every whim. Carnegie’s primary whim, however, is something he has in common with Eli: an instinct. Only the voice he hears comes from a darker place and tells him that he can fulfill a mission to widen the hold on what’s left of the world by using the Word of God as a weapon to “run the hearts and minds of the weak and desperate.” Think of him as a community organizer – the Jeremiah Wright of The After.

Carnegie runs a blown-out saloon complete with prostitutes and a bar. But his real hold on power is due to a secret water supply. Paying off his henchmen with H2O and girls, he sends them out to murder and rob innocents in the hope of finding the Good Book.

Carnegie also runs Claudia (the ageless Jennifer Beal) and her daughter Solara (the absurdly fetching Milas Kunis). As is expected, the dynamics Carnegie has become accustomed to, relationship and otherwise, will be turned on their head when Eli strolls into town. Oh, Eli’s not looking for trouble…

Like most of you, many years ago I decided that after the apocalypse it will be The Mighty Gary Oldman I’ll choose as arch-nemesis to my Road Warrior (or Tina Turner). Oldman has a high-old time here, and what a credit to this great actor that he can perfectly inhabit the buttoned-down Commissioner Gordon one day and leave no scenery left un-chewed as Carnegie the next. Every line of dialogue, facial expression and movement is delivered for maximum impact. Oldman understands this genre, what it takes to be its villain, and succeeds in finding a place of his own.
And oh how I loves me some Denzel.

After exploding on the scene with their still-just-as-powerful 1993 directorial debut “Menace II Society,” the Hughes Brothers (Albert and Allen, who have yet to make a bad film — this is their 5th) understand the iconic power of their star; the way he walks, talks, laughs, stands, and holds a weapon. In lesser hands the stoic Eli would barely register as a character. The power of an actor like Washington is in his unique and near-extinct movie star ability to fill the void of a character’s silence with an emotional inner-life without saying a word – with pure presence.

The directorial touches are everywhere. Listen for a fitting nod to “Once Upon a Time in America” and check out the posters on walls. The directors get the big things right, as well. Thank the Good Lord, no shaky-cam. The actions set-pieces are extremely satisfying, especially an early one we see only in silhouette.

But make no mistake, this is a genre film. A B-film (with kind of a silly final twist). No molds are broken. You’ve seen it all a hundred times before. But this is a Christian genre film … a very Christian genre film with a fabulous cast and stylish direction. And I’m still thinking about it, still debating which choice of the Brothers Hughes I liked most…

….the all-kinds-of-awesome casting decision to put Tom Waits in a post-apocalyptic Western, or the film’s most Christian moment – most generous moment – when a nod of respect is granted to our friends who have found God through other faiths.

Tags: Bible, Book of Eli, christian, Denzel Washington, faith, gary oldman, God, Hughes Brothers, Milas Kunis
Posted Jan 15th 2010 at 9:42 am in Film, Reviews


The Book of Eli: A Proudly Christian Movie

God, guns, and Johnny Cash? Blessed be this movie.

January 15, 2010 - by John Boot
http://pajamasmedia.com/

Cross I Am Legend with The Ten Commandments and you’ve got The Book of Eli, a genuinely religious parable that inherently rebukes pointless end-of-the-world movies like The Road. This time there’s a purpose to the post-apocalypse: Eli (Denzel Washington), one of humanity’s survivors, is heeding the word of the Lord to protect the world’s only remaining Bible and bring its teachings to the West.

The Book of Eli works just fine as an action blockbuster, but it’s much more than that. Eli, who can smell lurking “highjackers” determined to rob and kill him long before they get close, is fierce with a machete — the movie is as bloody as any other contemporary R-rated kill-or-be-killed flick — and his fearless strides across the wasted scapes of a broken and infected world are reminiscent of great cowboy movies. He even walks into a small town that looks like the set of one of those backlot Westerns like High Noon.

The chief of this evil place is Carnegie (Gary Oldman), who is seen reading a book on Mussolini, and not because he’s bored. He already wields absolute authority over his little village, but using Il Duce as a model he hopes to become ruler of what remains of the planet. He has sent his illiterate henchmen out into the world with orders to bring back every book they can find. But there’s only one book (besides the Mussolin biography) that matters to Carnegie: The Book. Eli’s Book. Carnegie has heard that this volume can change the world because of its persuasive effects on people, which Carnegie hopes to harness to his own ends. But Eli isn’t giving it up.
Here the movie springs a major plot leak — Carnegie captures Eli, who surrenders to gunmen and spends a night in Carnegie’s jail cell. Carnegie sends first his girlfriend (Jennifer Beals), who is blind, and then the girlfriend’s sexy daughter (Mila Kunis of Forgetting Sarah Marshall) to Eli’s cell to find out who he is. But wouldn’t Carnegie have ordered his men to search Eli’s belongings? The wanderer carries a single backpack. It wouldn’t be hard to discover that he has the world’s only known copy of the Bible.

Yet Eli escapes and in a searing shootout scene proves to be a better shot than Carnegie’s henchmen. A much better shot: there is something about Eli that makes bullets miss.

This plot — The Good, the Bad, and the Holy? — harks back to many a classic actioner, and the third-act revelations are particularly satisfying. But what’s most effective about the movie is its sincerity. Washington, the son of a Pentecostal minister who in a Beliefnet ranking system comes in second only to Mel Gibson among Hollywood’s most powerful Christian celebrities, doesn’t play Eli with a wisp of irony or jokiness. Eli lays out the case plainly: He heard a voice inside his head that gave him his mission. He says he knows who he heard, he knows what he heard, he knows he’s not crazy, and he knows he never would have made it without divine help. He reads the Bible every day and can quote scripture by heart. “That’s beautiful,” exclaims Kunis, whose character is illiterate, when she hears a sample passage. He also quotes a passage about having the strength to carry on. The Kunis character asks if that is from The Book. “No,” says Eli. “It’s Johnny Cash. ‘Live at Folsom Prison.’” God, guns, and Johnny Cash? Blessed be this movie.

Recall The Road, in which a man and his son move ever southward across a destroyed planet for no apparent reason, and The Book of Eli seems like — well, a revelation. Reintroducing God into the equation makes the scorched earth scenario much more interesting because it promises a rebirth, gives a meaning to the destruction of civilization as the crisis that, however painful, must happen to bring about salvation. Secular viewers may cringe — can’t we have more wisecracks and nihilism, please? — but The Book of Eli is going to strike at the very center of the hearts of viewers who have faith in the God of the Bible.

For audiences who wish there were more movies that were inspired by the Bible, movies like Ben-Hur or The Greatest Story Ever Told, but have come to doubt Hollywood could ever make a big-time movie (sorry, Kirk Cameron, but you’re not the star Denzel Washington is) about it, The Book of Eli is a godsend.

John Boot is the pen name of a conservative writer operating under deep cover in the liberal media.


In This World, It Pays to Be a Loner

By MANOHLA DARGIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
Published: January 15, 2010


Denzel Washington stars in “Book of Eli.”

A road warrior of a different sort, the title character played by Denzel Washington in “The Book of Eli” spends much of the story traveling by foot across an eerie landscape, a long and quick knife at the ready. The brown, dusty environs look familiar and not, dotted with abandoned cars and the occasional corpse. When Eli pauses, the camera settles near his feet, and the sky opens above him like a sheltering hand. With his green jacket and unsmiling mouth, he looks like a veteran of an unknown war, a soldier of misfortune — though, given the fog of religiosity that hangs over the movie, he might be an avenging angel.

This is the first movie directed by the talented twins Allen and Albert Hughes since “From Hell,” their torpid, predictably hyperviolent 2001 take on Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s graphic novel about Jack the Ripper. Although this new one has its comic-book qualities, good and bad, the Hugheses have stanched the blood in “The Book of Eli,” making it easier to pay attention to what else is happening on screen. They stage an early fight, for instance, entirely in silhouette, so that the arcs of spurting gore appear black, not red. Like all the fight sequences, this one is highly stylized: set inside a tunnel with the camera low and the sky serving as an illuminated backdrop, it looks like a page out of a comic come to animated life.

The graphic simplicity of this scene works not only because it’s visually striking, but also because it’s a part of a meaningful piece in a story in which everything, nature and civilization included, has been stripped away. Much like the land and narrative he travels through, Eli has been similarly reduced. A loner, he doesn’t speak much, even to himself. During the first few minutes of the movie, which opens in some barren woods with either falling snow or ash, he remains silently fixed on his task: bagging a pitifully thin cat. His first companion is a mouse (he offers it some roast cat), a creature that proves friendlier company than most of the isolated people he encounters, the majority of whom, as in “The Road,” would like to cook him over a fire.

Shooting in high-definition digital (with the Red camera) and working with the cinematographer Don Burgess (a frequent shooter for Robert Zemeckis), with New Mexico standing in for America, the Hugheses have created a plausible post-apocalyptic world, one that draws from the western (Hollywood, Sergio Leone) and the tradition of science-fiction dystopia. As George Miller proved in his brilliant “Mad Max” cycle — one of the Hughes brothers’ more overt cinematic touchstones here — and as Quentin Tarantino reaffirmed with his two “Kill Bill” films, the western can be reconfigured to suit any number of contexts, themes and warriors. (In one scene, when Eli settles into a room, a poster for the 1975 cult film “A Boy and His Dog,” another post-apocalyptic fairy tale, hangs on the wall behind him.)

After hunting the cat, a little human mayhem and a lot of atmospheric preambles, Eli wanders into a deadwood town and the story kicks into gear, for better if sometimes for disappointing worse. The happiest development is the introduction of Gary Oldman as Carnegie, the leader of the outpost. Fortified by his thugs, including some bulging muscle called Redridge (Ray Stevenson, from the HBO show “Rome”), Carnegie keeps the peace, doling out the scarce supplies to the ragtag inhabitants. Among the few faces that stand out from the squinting, scurrying horde are a Mr. Fixit (an amusing Tom Waits); Carnegie’s lover, Claudia (a sympathetic Jennifer Beals); and her daughter, Solara (the miscast Mila Kunis), who despite the deprivations, appears to have swung by a Beverly Hills salon for an eyebrow wax.

Mr. Oldman gives the movie, which at its most serious veers into lugubriousness, a nice jolt and a flinty presence that Mr. Washington can spark against. But the story that the two play out, beat by beat, cliché by cliché, rarely rises to their talents. Written by Gary Whitta, with some rewriting by Anthony Peckham, the story takes a wrong turn once Solara enters the picture, first as bait for Eli (he doesn’t bite) and then as his unwanted traveling companion. Ms. Kunis can work on the big screen, as she proved in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” But, dressed up in clothes that look as if they had been distressed for sale in a TriBeCa boutique, her white, white teeth shining and glossy hair swinging, she is flatly absurd.
Ms. Kunis isn’t to blame. As Jessica Rabbit says, with knowing wit, in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”: “I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.” Even so, despite Solara and her manicured brows, and the increasingly pro forma action — Eli has what Carnegie wants, and so the bad man gives rabid chase — the movie keeps you watching and generally engaged. There’s a ticklish interlude at a house where Eli and Solara encounter a fine pair named Martha and George, played with energy and inviting humor by Frances de la Tour and the invaluable Michael Gambon. Despite the air of unease and wary glances, when George cranks up a phonograph, and the disco song “Ring My Bell” pours out, you’re happily, goofily hooked.


“The Book of Eli” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). The usual dystopian violence.

The Book of Eli

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Allen Hughes and Albert Hughes; written by Gary Whitta; director of photography, Don Burgess; edited by Cindy Mollo; music by Atticus Ross; production designer, Gae Buckley; produced by Joel Silver, Denzel Washington, Broderick Johnson, Andrew A. Kosove and David Valdes; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes.

WITH: Denzel Washington (Eli), Gary Oldman (Carnegie), Mila Kunis (Solara), Ray Stevenson (Redridge), Jennifer Beals (Claudia), Tom Waits (Engineer), Frances de la Tour (Martha) and Michael Gambon (George).


Book of Eli

BY ROGER EBERT
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage
January 13, 2010

I'm at a loss for words, so let me say these right away: "The Book of Eli" is very watchable. You won't be sorry you went. It grips your attention, and then at the end throws in several WTF! Moments, which are a bonus. They make everything in the entire movie impossible and incomprehensible -- but, hey, WTF.

Now to the words I am at a loss for. The story involves a lone wanderer (Denzel Washington) who wears a name tag saying "Hi! My name is Eli." It may not actually be his name tag, but let's call him Eli, anyway. Eli has been walking west across the devastated landscape of America for 30 years, on his way to the sea. I haven't walked it myself, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't take that long.

On the other hand, maybe Eli only thought he was walking west. On his final trek, he walks from right to left across the screen, which in movie shorthand is walking east. "How do you know you're walking the right way?" he's asked. "Faith," he says, a reply that takes on added resonance later in the film. Eli is a quick hand with knives, pistols, rifles, shotguns and karate. He needs to be. After a catastrophe has wiped out most of the Earth's population and left ruin and desolation behind, the remaining humans are victimized by roaming motorcycle gangs of hijackers and thieves. Each of these gangs is issued a requisite tall bald man, a short hairy scruffy one and their go-fers.

The Hughes brothers, Albert and Allen, film this story in sunburned browns and pale blues, creating a dry and dusty world under a merciless sky. Water is treasure. This wasteland Eli treks at an implacable pace. Set upon in an ambush, he kills all his attackers. He's got one of those knives that makes a snicker-snack noise all by itself, and is a one-man army. Why don't the bad guys just shoot at him? Later in the film, they try that.

Washington and the Hughes brothers do a good job of establishing this man and his world, and at first, "The Book of Eli" seems destined to be solemn. But then Eli arrives at a Western town ruled by Carnegie (Gary Oldman), who, like all the local overloads in Westerns and gangster movies, sits behind a big desk flanked by a tall bald guy and, of course, a short scruffy one. How are these guys recruited? Wanted: Tall bald guy to stand behind town boss and be willing to sacrifice life. All the water you can drink.

In this town, desperate and starving people live in rusty cars and in the streets. We meet Carnegie's abused wife Claudia (Jennifer Beals) and her daughter Solara (Mila Kunis), named, for some reason, after the cause of all the destruction. She's a prostitute in Carnegie's bar, having made the mistake of coming in on Take Your Child to Work Day. Carnegie hurts Claudia to control Solara. How he controls the fearsome bald guy is hard to say.

The third act is recycled, but done well, out of many Westerns in which the hero and the girl hole up and are surrounded. So many other movies are referenced that we almost miss it when their hideout house is perforated by bullets in "L.A. Confidential" style. That allows countless beams of sunlight to shine in and function as a metaphor.

Carnegie needs Eli because Eli has maybe the last remaining copy of a book that Eli believes will allow him to expand and rule many more towns. I am forbidden by the Critic's Little Rule Book from naming the volume, but if you've made a guess after seeing numerous billboards stating RELIGION IS POWER, you may have guessed right.

The Hughes brothers have a vivid way with imagery here, as in their earlier films such as "Menace II Society" and the underrated "From Hell." The film looks and feels good, and Washington's performance is the more uncanny the more we think back over it. The ending is "flawed," as we critics like to say, but it's so magnificently, shamelessly, implausibly flawed that (a) it breaks apart from the movie and has a life of its own, or (b) at least it avoids being predictable.

Now do yourself a favor and don't talk to anybody about the film if you plan to see