By Faris Tanyos for KDRV
 
January 20, 2010
 
Grade: B-
 
The Book of Eli is really a Nine Inch Nails music video that runs the better part of two hours.
 
Ask yourself if you'd watch Trent Reznor croon for TWO uninterrupted hours... No one's winning here... Not Trent, not us...
 
TBOE starts and ends strongly. It has a few good ideas; some solid, solitary scenes. But they are fleeting; and the extended lulls in between aren't compelling enough to make them worth the wait... But it's not terrible... It's worth watching once.... If only for a magnificent scene with Michael Gambon and Frances de la Tour as George & Martha, a couple of friendly, degenerate, neighborhood cannibals with a proclivity for Anita Ward...
 
The Book of Eli is in fact the Book of Denzel masquerading as an exploration of a post-apocalyptic world. It has, however, about as much to say about a post-apocalyptic world as Little Miss Sunshine had to say about beauty pageants... naught, zilch.
 
No, picture TBOE as more of a Western; then it instantly makes more sense. Denzel is Clint Eastwood's Joe in A Fistful of Dollars. Gary Oldman is Gene Hackman's John Herod in The Quick and the Dead. Mila Kunis is... Jackie from That 70s Show.
 
The lulls... the lulls... the lulls...
 
TBOE opens with Eli (Denzel Washington) dressed in camouflage, wearing a gas mask, hiding in a thicket, patiently waiting to bow-and-arrow a cat. The situation is dire and we are engaged, but not for long.
 
The Hughes Brothers follow this riveting moment with an ineffectual montage of Denzel walkathons; with the dual purpose of filling time and incessantly reminding us that DW is cool in a righteous-sort-of-way, his burden is justice, even though he just wants to be left alone... The camera fixates on him as he walks down a long, deserted road with a singular determination, sporting Top Gun shades, billows of dust swirling around him, an excess of weaponry strapped to his back. This visual will be frequently repeated at various points in the film. Every so often he gets ambushed by a gang of knuckleheaded miscreants, who he calmly and methodically disposes of in sequences of Denzel-like efficiency; but not before taking the time to provide them with quips à la Jules Winnfield. In the few moments of quiet, Eli finds solitude in the voice of Al Green.
 
We know very little about this world. The land is stark and dry and colorless. The sun is too strong. 30 years prior there was a world war, and then a hole in the sky, and then the Big Flash wiped out most of the human race. We find out why Eli is walking so doggedly west, why everyone looks like they stepped out of a Ray-Ban advert. Eli comes across cars with human skeletons and rundown, abandoned houses. Water is at a premium. Food is scarce. Chapstick and shampoo are rare luxuries. There is no law, no order, no society, people are irritable, and they glare at one another distrustfully, and with good reason.
 
Eventually, Eli comes to a 'town'. There's no money, everything runs on a barter system. He offers an engineer, played by Tom Waits (What?), KFC toilettes and a lighter in exchange for charging his iPod, a valuable remnant of the past.
 
The 'town' is run by Carnegie (Oldman). We know Carnegie is an unsavory fellow because, when we first meet him, he's reading a biography of Mussolini; the signs are in place. Carnegie takes Reading Rainbow to the next level. He loves books, which are rare, and has sent his hoodlums scouring the land in search of one in particular, The Book, of which there is only one copy left on earth. The rest were allegedly burned during the war. Carnegie believes this book will give him the appropriate tools to wield power... The title should help you piece together the rest.
 
Of course, Eli can't complete his journey without being sidetracked by a cohort, so Screenwriter Gary Whitta gives him one in the form of Solara (Mila Kunis), who's so laughably miscast that it almost derails the film, but not quite, because Oldman's performance is so good it saves it.
 
TBOE has a video game feel to it. It's not surprising that Whitta is a video game journalist who co-founded PC Gamer magazine. The script, which doesn't live up to the frame of its themes, was rewritten by Anthony Peckham, who adapted the screenplay for Invictus and co-adapted Sherlock Holmes.
 
The most fascinating question in TBOE is why Carnegie so badly wants The Book: He believes its ideas to be more powerful, more potent, than any physical weapon; that they can be abused and twisted to control and manipulate people's minds and hearts more effectively than guns and bombs and fear ever could... there are dangerous implications to that. To Carnegie, it is a gateway to power, and that's nothing new. Selfish, evil acts have been done in good's name for thousands of years.
 
Eli's mission is to guard those ideas from men like Carnegie, who seek them out for ill-gain, and that conflict is the heart of this film.
 
While Whitta, Peckham & the Hughes Bros. succeed at crafting a story with a tangible enough foundation to examine this question, they miss the heart: They waste too much time veering into unnecessary subplots to give it its due.
 
ftanyos@kdrv.com