Movie: The Book of Eli (Albert & Allen Hughes, 2010)
This film has too many portentous shots of Denzel Washington walking through a desolated landscape in slow motion. That desolated landscape is part of a typical 2010's CGI-ed, 'gritty', grey, desaturated post-apocalyptic look, probably the least appealing aesthetic in film history. There are ways to depict a fallen world that don't make much of your movie look like a slab of concrete, but the Hughes brothers don't show a lot of interest in exploring these options. And yet, despite all this, I quite enjoyed The Book of Eli. There aren't a lot of films able to say that they are gnarly genre fiction (there are more than a few moments that really work great as good ol' nasty B-pulp) aimed at devout (black) Christians.
Denzel Washington basically spends this film doing two things: beating people up and quoting the Bible verbatim, which leads to a delightfully ridiculous plot twist at the end of the film. Eli's (Denzel Washington) book is in fact the last existing exemplar of the King James Bible, apparently the most precious possession one can have in a post-apocayptic world. Hero or villain, every single character here believes that civilisation can only be rebuilt with the Bible as its fundament. Eli is on a quest to the West to deliver it somewhere to somebody, believing that the mysterious voices guiding him will eventually bring him to the correct place. The film takes this obvious religious parable seriously and presents the Bible as a book with genuinely valuable moral lessons, some of which play out over the course of the film.
At the same time the Hughes brothers find plenty of room for some good ass-kicking and colorfully profane vulgarity, never presenting the film's religious and pulpy sensibilities as contradictory, or apologising for either. It's Man on Fire for God-fearing, Bible-reading churchgoers; Washington essentially plays Jesus with John Creasy's attitude and some great kung fu skills. It's impossible to dismiss that, especially if you add into this mix some kind-hearted cannibals, motorcycle gangs, shady saloons, Tom Waits as a nifty store owner, an even niftier Mila Kunis, and Gary Oldman in one of his last go-for-insanity roles before deciding that having an Oscar would be nice. I also enjoyed the idea to make Alcatraz the most peaceful place on Earth, and found the ending more thoughtful than it ever needed to be.
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