“Book of Eli” fails to mix theology and action

With “The Book of Eli,” the Hughes brothers (“Menace II Society,” “Dead Presidents,” “From Hell”) have made their entry into the timeworn genre of the post-apocalyptic western. For the most part, the film’s aesthetic is engaging, if relentlessly clichéd, but there’s a twist in the final 15 minutes of the film that is completely baffling and nonsensical, which makes the whole movie seem inert and forgettable.
 

The Hughes brothers rely on a Macguffin—in this case the King James Bible—as an excuse to have Denzel Washington do a number on a few bad guys, and have Gary Oldman serve as the colorful antagonist. Those portions of the film are all fine and dandy, but then the movie starts to take its religiosity far too seriously, which is the same problem that plagued James Cameron’s “Avatar.” The film insists that it is a “serious movie” with “important ideas” and “major themes.” Granted, James Cameron’s “Avatar” also suffered from a total lack of script and mediocre acting, but in the end both movies basically add up to about the same level of quality.

The film begins with Eli, a wanderer trekking across the irradiated United States on a mission, supposedly, from God. He carries the last known copy of the King James Bible in existence, as the other copies were all destroyed in a fit of anti-religious paranoia following the unspecified apocalyptic event. Eli has been traveling on foot from the East Coast to the West Coast over the course of 30 years, due to his belief that God spoke to him and told him to use the last Bible as a way to restart civilization.  He trudges on through the wasteland, listening to soul music on his quasi-iPod listening device, and occasionally slicing up some hijackers and marauders that happen to cross his path.

Did I mention that Eli has almost superhuman powers? He does. He has a sword that can slice off someone’s hand/head/limbs at lightning speed, his guns never miss, and he can shoot a bird out of the air in one shot using a bow and arrow. These action scenes are surprisingly engaging because the Hughes brothers make good use of the Red digital cameras, framing their action scenes in long shot so that we can actually see what’s going on. No choppy Michael Bay editing here—just clearly shot action.

Eli eventually makes his way to a small town run by the corrupt mayor Carnegie, played by Gary Oldman. Carnegie keeps a blind woman (Jennifer Beals) as his concubine, and uses her daughter Solara (Mila Kunis) as both a prostitute and a barmaid for the town tavern. Carnegie has a right hand man, played by Ray Stevenson, and whole gang of illiterate bikers that he uses to scour the wastes looking for a book (I assume that you can correctly guess which book Carnegie happens to be looking for).

Carnegie is one of the few people old enough to remember not only life before the apocalyptic event, but also the role of religion back then.  Since he’s the villain of the movie, Carnegie naturally wants to use religion as a way of controlling and expanding his territory. When Eli rolls into town and refuses to hand the Bible over to Carnegie, that’s when the action set pieces start. Along the way Eli is joined by Solara, who looks a little too clean for someone living in a grimy wasteland.   

The acting in the film is fun, especially from Gary Oldman, who by now has cemented his place among Hollywood’s finest actors. He manages to play an over–the-top, timeworn villain like Carnegie modulated to precisely the right level of fury and cunning, never chewing the scenery. Denzel Washington is effective as Eli, taciturn and somber, in the way that this kind of action hero so often is. Kunis is unfortunately miscast as Solara, since she looks far too young and—as previously stated—is just a little too clean and pretty.

The most fun however comes from character actors like Ray Stevenson, as Carnegie’s head thug, musician Tom Waits as the town mechanic, and Michael Gambon and Frances de la Tour as a couple of cannibalistic geriatrics named George and Martha.

It’s too bad that fun acting and spasmodic instances of entertaining action scenes don’t save this movie from its ridiculous religious posturing and an ending that makes no sense when you think about the previous scenes. Its “religious” content is almost laughably earnest, in spite of the fact that the film only cherry picks the most famous passages from the Bible (Psalms 23:4, Genesis 3:19, etc.) and then simply uses them for effect rather than using them to actually say something. I was at least hoping that Eli would proclaim that “I was sent by He who is called I Am,” but you can only ask for so much from a movie.  Also, Eli kneels down beside the men he slaughters early on, ostensibly in prayer, and then proceeds to brutally murder several more people in the next 20 minutes or so, assuring them that they will be judged by God for their sins. For a supposed prophet/messiah, Eli is operating on some pretty shaky theological ground.

“The Book of Eli” tries to take the genre of the post-apocalyptic western and give it some flair by sprinkling it with some half-hearted, religious imagery and moralization. One wonders what could have happened if they put a little more thought into the script; perhaps they would have come up with a movie worth watching. Yet all they have is a pale retread of the “Mad Max”/”Road Warrior” films (much, much better movies by the way) with a tacked on message about the power of religion. That’s not all that much better than a pale sci-fi retread of “Dances With Wolves” with a tacked on message of environmentalism/anti-colonialism, but the difference is that “The Book of Eli” doesn’t have the benefit of being a James Cameron SFX juggernaut, which means this mediocre movie won’t be steamrolling its way to the Oscars.