In Theaters: The Book of Eli

Along the way Eli meets bad people -- people who eat people -- but displays an infallibility in combat that we are meant to assume approaches the divine. I guess we're also meant to assume Eli stopped reading his King James Bible before pacifism made its big, manger-rocking debut. There are several brutal fight sequences in the film -- the first one shot in a comic book silhouette -- and they generally go like this: Eli smells trouble, Eli is surrounded by terrifying goons, Eli quotes scripture and kick-eth ass.

Entering a one-street town to find water and juice up some of his mysterious equipment, Eli has typically hostile (and then grudgingly respectful) interactions with a shopkeeper (played by cinema's favorite pinch-hitter, Tom Waits) and the bartender at the saloon/whorehouse owned by a guy named Carnegie (Gary Oldman). When Eli decimates Carnegie's clientele after a minor misunderstanding, the two men have a brief, snack-sized act-off in the upstairs quarters: ham on white bread. Actually, from that scene comes the film's first and most interesting notion, one that the Hughes and first-time scriptwriter Gary Whitta seem to have struck on like a broken clock: "As old as we are," Carnegie says, "people like you and me, we're the future." They remember the old world and its lessons, they are literate and lead inner lives still fueled, if only in memory, by something other than survival instincts. They are relics but like the wet-naps now traded like gold coins, they -- and not the youth -- have become precious to reviving something resembling the learned condition of civilization. The line evaporates almost as quickly as it is uttered, however, and Carnegie, who is obsessed with finding a bible so he can use it to control the masses, is spouting things like, "It's not a book, it's a weapon aimed at the minds and the hearts of the desperate."

Everyone wears sunglasses or goggles in the sun, which is bad news for Washington, whose chronic impassivity didn't really need any help, but great for Mila Kunis -- playing the enslaved step-daughter of Carnegie -- who gets to top off her boho chic ensembles with some bitching aviators. The Hughes add self-conscious mood and energy here and there (they shot with RED digital cameras), by sometimes speeding up the film and sometimes slowing it down; occasionally they send it zooming into or out of an impossible opening. The soundtrack is strictly sci-fi, and arty, Kubrickian sci-fi at that: lots of big, flatulent blasts of synth and horns. It amounts to so much decoration, an attempt to trim a story that fails to move because it never offers a clear set of terms.

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