The Book of Eli

The Book of Eli Directed by Allen and Albert Hughes Runtime: 118 min.

The Book of Eli, yet another apocalyptic fantasy, suggests that Denzel Washington has become America’s dullest actor.This old news is confirmed by the fact that he also produced The Book of Eli, which was written and directed by twin brothers Allen and Albert Hughes, the scurrilous team whose Menace II Society and American Pimp proved they shared Denzel’s taste for kitsch.These perpetual hip-hop adolescents cater to Denzel’s inner brat by providing him with a Mad Max role: Eli is a traveler, a “walker” strolling with an armlength phallic blade and bad-ass attitude (super powers to geeks like the Hughes) through a devastated, monochrome landscape full of marauders and cannibals.

How does Denzel play such a role? With his usual self-righteous glare. He leans on facile expressions of black male studliness— the virtuous egotism that David Gordon Green accurately assessed as “phony intensity.” Rivaling Will Smith’s superhero status and Wesley Snipes’ flair seems like Denzel’s attempt to become a poster boy for black scifi geeks—the only conceivable audience for adolescent trash like this.The Hughes Brothers set up silhouetted combat scenes (styled after Park Chan Wook’s Old Boy) where an outnumbered Eli destroys his attackers.The combination of warrior and sage makes Eli more somber than your usual action movie samurai and less than exciting because his prowess is tied to a contradictory, scripturequoting moral authority that, the Hughes Brothers hint, is divinely inspired.

Funny how the Hughes’ post-literate, thuggish sensibility favors a plot in which Eli guards a sacred book.There’s no sense in this film of what apocalypse classically means; it’s just a comic book trope. It takes on a laughable, sociological slant when a despot named Carnegie (played by Gary I’ll-do-anything Oldman) sics his goons and a concubine, Solara (Mila Kunis), to capture the book Eli possesses.This Fahrenheit 451 subplot feels like just another rip-off, with poorly conceived notions about social collapse. The Hughes Brothers’ postmodern idiocy merely refers to familiar ideas as if they were sufficient dramatic explication. And surely the Hughes Brothers don’t believe in the power of the word—or The Word. Scenes where Eli recites chapter and verse convey little lyricism; they come off like some barely-remembered Sunday School pageant speech.This is another example of Denzel’s dignity pretense; Eli’s implied holiness seems no more sincere than the heebie-jeebies Denzel was selling in Fallen or his “King-Kong-ain’t-got-shit-on-me!” swagger in Training Day.

By helping Denzel put on his sham with such a straight face, the Hughes Brothers humorlessly repeat all the apocalypse-samurai clichés.They certainly don’t have the filmmaking skill to make these routines viscerally exciting the way George Miller did in the Mad Max trilogy.The Hughes Brothers’ own dullness shows in the way they go through the action-movie motions without a single display of compositional ingenuity.They make the apocalypse look dull the same way Denzel makes heroism and saintliness unexceptional.