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Dir. Albert & Allen Hughes

Rating: 5.3  |  0 User Reviews  |  Send to Friend

By Piers Marchant

So, the matter of what a post-apocalyptic USA might look like has pretty much been settled: There'll be burned out highways, to be sure, with carcasses of cars and skeletons of the hapless people driving them when the bombs dropped. There will also be leafless trees, and cannibals and washed out colors, so that everything will look sepia toned. There will also be a man on a quest for something, some semblance of what was lost before the great nuclear winter.

The man, in this particular case, is Eli (Denzel Washington), a lone "walker" who appears to own the last existing copy of the Holy Bible. This he is grimly taking out west for reasons he doesn't entirely know. Along the way, he encounters brigands and pillagers, whom he quickly dispatches with his machete and/or arsenal of firearms -- a kung fu Jesus apostle armed to the teeth. He eventually runs afoul of a learned man named Carnegie (Gary Oldman, in full scene-chewing mode), who recognizes the potential power of the book Eli has stashed away in his backpack and wants it for himself. Joined by a fetching young woman named Solara (Mila Kunis), Eli hastens across the ruined desert landscape, trying to survive long enough to put "the book" in safe hands.

Clearly, the Brothers Hughes are striving for something deeply felt -- a Christian-approved bit of kickass, which actually could have been a bit of fun if it didn't take itself quite so seriously. Lacking any of the psychological depth of The Road, the film doesn't measure up even as an outrageous action flick. A bit more Mad Max and a bit less of the heavy-handed religious allegory, and they might have had something. As it is, we have just another end of civilization set-to, with burnt-toast coloring, a maudlin soundtrack, and a shocking twist that really makes no damn sense at all. It doesn't help that almost every secondary character is played by such a known quantity. To put it another way, it doesn’t add the film's illusory power to see that Malcolm McDowell still has a giant, bulbous nose, or 30 years into a nuclear holocaust, Tom Waits still wears fetching hats.

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