The Book of Eli:


Frank C. Warren
Picture Courtesy Of Warner Bros.

Movie Length: 118 minutes
Rated:R
Released: Jan. 15, 2010
Starring: Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman, and Mila Kunis
Directors: Allen and Albert Hughes
Screenplay: Gary Whitta
Showing: The Carmike and Regal Cinemas
When: Various times

Once again, Denzel Washington
comes through the screen with a largerthan-
life role in the new movie “The
Book of Eli.” Full of great action-packed
sequences and a plethora of surprises,
this movie will be a treat to apocalyptic
adventurers everywhere.

For 30 years, Eli (Denzel
Washington) has been walking across
America to the west, carrying a book
that “God” has told him to take to a
certain city by faith. After many mishaps,
he finally comes across a functioning,
populated town so that he can charge his
iPod. During his time there, trouble breaks
out and he finds himself before bad-guy
Carnegie (Gary Oldman). They have a
scuffle over the book, which Carnegie has
been searching for all his life. Meanwhile,
Eli meets Solara (Mila Kunis) who
follows him when he leaves town. Right
up until the end it’s a page-turner of a
movie with a surprising ending that speaks
a lot about the value of having a certain
kind of faith.

Roger Ebert, in his blog for the
Chicago Sun-Times, says: “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...”

Michael O’Sullivan of the
Washington Post said: “Most people have
some good in them and some bad. This is
one of the messages of ‘The Book of Eli,’
a hyper-violent, post-apocalyptic Western
in the mold of ‘Mad Max’ that can’t make
up its mind whether it wants to be corny
or misanthropic.”

Though there are some Christian
references in the movie, most viewers
shouldn’t find things overwhelmingly
spiritual. “The Book of Eli” is still an
action movie, with lots of shotguns,
ladies, killing, broken bones and gore.

Alex Remington of the Huffington
Post sums it up best when he wrote
this concerning the movie:
As movie
premises go, it’s hard to top a postapocalyptic
action movie. Every scene
and setpiece is a perfect empty canvas
for a lunatic art department to create a
frightening, barely recognizable vision
of our world to tell a story with burnt-out
rubble of how humanity destroyed itself,
as we all know will happen some day.
There are many great movies
coming out with special effects; this
movie is in my top-ten of 2009-10
because it has a good plot, awesome
special effects, and it has a great cast to go
with it. Gary Oldman plays an awesome
super-villian and Denzel Washington is a
truly heroic figure in the quest for good.
If you liked “Mad Max,” you’ll love this
movie. This movie gets four out of five
stars.


1 comments:

lacey j. said...

Great job fleshing out the plot Frank. I was already looking forward to seeing "The Book of Eli", but even more so now!

- L

January 24, 2010 at 10:00 PM

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