Word: ely
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Washington, 55, is some kind of deity - a man of God if not the Lord himself - in The Book of Eli, the grand and grimy post-apocalyptic western from the twin auteurs Allen and Albert Hughes. They must have recognized an anomaly in Washington's quarter-century star career: that, like Tom Hanks but not many others, he's been a major movie male without anchoring an action franchise. (He hasn't even made a sequel, though there may soon be one to Inside Man.) A two-time Oscar winner - Best Actor for Training Day, Best Supporting Actor for Glory...
...Eli pushes the actor into Wesley Snipes territory, as he plays a figure who channels both a taciturn John Wayne hero and the implacable warriors of Japanese samurai films like Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo and the Zatoichi blind-swordsman series - all of which fed on, and in turn fed, the Hollywood notion of solitary, preternatural machismo. The new movie taps Washington's coiled strength, transforms that asset into a weapon and gives him the chance to kick ass for righteousness' sake...
...desaturated color scheme makes the whole world look as if it were left outside to die, and it was. Marauding punks prey on solitary travelers for water, food and clothing. With all industrial and agricultural sectors in shambles, the fear-market system applies: survival of the meanest. Or, in Eli's case, the purest. He's a good man with a Good Book - a rare extant copy of the Bible, whose possession he will defend with his life. (See the top 10 movies...
...tradition of the solo cowboy who needs a scurvy town to clean up, one corpse at a time, Eli lands in an outpost run by the wily, chatty Carnegie (Gary Oldman, having infectious fun with the villain role) and overrun by his gang. One of the few readers in a world of illiterates, Carnegie wants what Eli has, for he believes that the Bible's rhetoric can subdue men more successfully than fear and firearms can. "They'll do exactly what I tell 'em," he says, "if the words are from the Book." (See pictures of Detroit's beautiful, horrible...
...this town, humanity is represented by Claudia (Jennifer Beals), Carnegie's mistress and hostage, and her daughter Solara (Mila Kunis); they will be less Eli's allies than his baggage as he fights off Carnegie's gunmen. Not that Eli needs much help. A half-dozen men in the saloon, a dozen or more in a Main Street shoot-out, the whole Carnegie regiment ready to reduce to rubble the rural house Eli has holed up in with a grizzled couple (Brit theatrical giants Michael Gambon and Frances de la Tour) and Solara - none of these armies can bring...