It's hard to talk much about this film without giving away the 2 spoilers - what the book is, and what happens to it at the end - so I'm going to tread a very careful path, say that it was a bit too carefully paced for its own good, and, um ........It was well shot - I hesitate to say "beautifully shot" because it's hard to call a post-apocalytic world alternating between baking sun and falling ash "beautiful". Maybe "starkly shot" is more accurate. The trouble is, describing the quality of the cinematography in any movie is like saying "nice legs, shame about the face". And on that topic, I've often wondered whether the director and cast of a movie that gets a "best screenplay" award, but nothing else, curse themselves for having screwed up the directing and acting.
The trailers that show an outnumbered Denzel deftly hacking his way through the baddies are representative of just a few minutes of the film. Most of the time he's schlepping along desert dry roads carrying an assortment of weapons, iPod, power pack, gloves, scarves and, of course, THE book.
It was (and I usually hate these potted positioning statements), Mad Max meets The Road meets Unforgiven.
The Mad Max analogy makes me wonder why all teetering-near-the-end-of-the-world films portray the characters as having raided a WWII army surplus store. Why wouldn't a world ravaged by nuclear war, solar flares or volcanic disaster adopt a hippie ethos?
One wouldn't use words like exciting, gripping or suspenseful to describe The Book of Eli, more steady, earnest and well-intended.
The good news for us British is that apparently, more Brits will survive the Apocalypse than will Americans. Eli stars the UK's Gary Oldman, Ray Stevenson, Malcolm McDowell, Frances de la Tour and Michael Gambon (the last two in what must be the strangest cameos either of them have enjoyed).
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