The Book of Eli (2010, 118mins) Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman, Mila Kunis

Eli is a movie about a man with a mysterious book and on a mysterious journey. Eli (Washingon) is in a post-apocalyptic world (not unlike the movie The Road) in which the world is in ruins from an unknown cause. All we know is Eli is a bad ass, that water and food is scarce, and Carnegie (Oldman) has a hard on to possess some long lost unknown book. As always Oldman plays a ruthless bad guy to a tee. He’s cold calculating and wants just one thing. The movie has plenty of underlying tones to it, mainly b/c we all know what we think the book is and we all know why Eli is such a BAMF. It’s a good movie for those of us who like this sort of setting. It really makes the game lovers among us think about how a game like Fallout would translate to the big screen. 

Although I liked this movie I do have a few minor problems with it. More and more these days movies take volume manipulation to new extremes. They tend to go extremely low in the dialog and then when action or music comes it practically blows out your eardrums b/c you either are straining to hear the talking or you have turned the volume up so high to hear what everyone is saying. Here we have Eli as so mysterious, and Carnigie as so evil and wispy that we can barely understand what either says especially to each other. The other thing is the movie never really follows any sort of normal movie flow. The flow that kind has either the buildup to a big climax or a few smaller climax before the big finish. It kinda throws action at us normally at the beginning then from the midway on it just kinda sputters about and the “climax” per-se really isn’t anywhere near what the movie builds up to. There is a couple of minor twists here and there, but we kinda want more out of the end. Like I said very minor negaives.

Verdict—> Another good movie, both as a sci-fi type movie with some good action and a movie that keeps you guessing a bit. Def worth a rental.

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