The clouds are gray, the scorched earth is gray, and the age-old nuclear ash falling from the sky is gray. If you look closely at Denzel Washington, as he saunters in slow motion through a bombed-out hotel lobby full of rotten-toothed ruffians, you can see that his hair and beard are flecked with gray as well. Is it just our imagination, or is the aridly desolate post-apocalyptic road movie showing its age? In the last 35 years or so, there have been an awful lot of them, going back to A Boy and His Dog (1976) and, of course, The Road Warrior (1982)  the greatest of all futuristic wasteland thrillers  and, most recently, The Road. I'm not sure if anyone was clamoring for another one of these films just now, but one thing is certain: We don't need The Book of Eli, a ponderous dystopian bummer that might be described as The Road Warrior without car chases, or The Road without humanity. 
 
 What's left? A lot of wide-open barren desert space shot from music-video angles (think the Red Hot Chili Peppers' ''Give It Away''). The directors, Allen and Albert Hughes, do their best to make the landscape threatening by filling it with a token sprinkle of homicidal bikers and cannibals, plus Gary Oldman as an evil ringleader whose scariest aspect is his harshly photographed skin. Roving through it all is Washington's Eli, a monosyllabic lone gunslinger in a signature outfit of sunglasses, kaffiyeh, and knapsack packed with lethal blade. He's a mystical avenger who has been wandering through the wilderness for 30 years, toting a leather-bound King James Bible from which he plucks ominous quotes. He makes apocalyptic prophecy sound like a rerun. 
 
 I'd be willing to forgive The Book of Eli its portentous sins if it had kick-ass action scenes, and every so often Eli does slice and dice the stuffing out of half a dozen hooligans at once, or he presides over a gun battle in which the bullets clatter and echo with full-metal zing. But those are just about the only scenes in the movie that have a pulse. At their best, the Hughes brothers have been brilliant directors: Their first film, the 1993 mind-of-a-gangbanger classic Menace II Society (made when they were just 20), established them as visceral and psychological prodigies, and the criminally underrated From Hell (2001) was a gothic-shock serial-killer mystery that featured Johnny Depp in one of his finest performances. (Had he been the mainstream superstar he is today back when the film was released, it might have been a sensation.) The Book of Eli is the first Hughes brothers movie that feels stripped of drama, imagination, sensibility. Some may find the film worth sitting through simply for its final ''Whoa!'' of a twist, but the Hughes brothers direct most of it as if they were glorified end-of-the-world set decorators. The Book of Eli is like a movie based on a graphic novel you don't want to read. D 
 
 See all of this week's reviews ||||| Enlarge Warner Bros. Pictures Existing in a demolished world, Eli (Denzel Washington) keeps to himself. When he's challenged, his machete does the talking for him. ABOUT THE MOVIE ABOUT THE MOVIE The Book of Eli 
 
 * * out of four Stars: Denzel Washington , Mila Kunis, 
 
 Gary Oldman , Jennifer Beals, Malcolm McDowell, Tom Waits 
 
 Directors: Albert and Allen Hughes 
 
 Distributor: Warner Bros. 
 
 Rating: R for some brutal violence 
 
 and language 
 
 Running time: 1 hour, 57 minutes 
 
 Opens Friday nationwide Post-apocalyptic desolation is spreading like a contagion. MEET THE DIRECTORS: Allen and Albert Hughes open up GETTING BIBLICAL: Hollywood gets religion TRAILER: Get a read on 'The Book of Eli' FAITH AND REASON BLOG: Is every scripture-inspired script worthwhile? A month ago we had The Road, and a month before that it was 2012. The latest end-of-the-world movie is The Book of Eli, which looks as if it borrowed some of the ravaged landscape, battered clapboard houses and marauding extras from the world inhabited by Viggo Mortensen in The Road. Computer-generated images of toppled skyscrapers, severed freeways, decaying cars and rotting skeletons look numbingly familiar. But while devastation, disaster and brutality reign in all three movies, the difference here is the strident religious message. Poetic psalms uttered amid stylized violence are disconcerting. Religion and bloodshed, though linked through much of history, make queasy entertainment partners. An attractively grizzled Denzel Washington plays the enigmatic Eli, a true believer with quasi-mystical fighting skills. He walks the barren roads, fending off desperate highwaymen, with a leather-bound King James Bible stowed carefully in his ragged knapsack. Having received what he believes is divine revelation, Eli is on a mission to a place he refers to as "west." He tries to avoid confrontation but puts up a hellacious fight if challenged. Only Eli and a few others remember how things were before the war that destroyed their world. Young people have not been taught to read. One of the few literates with potent memories is Carnegie (Gary Oldman in over-the-top villainous mode), a venal, self-styled dictator of a re-populated ghost town. When Carnegie learns that Eli has the book he's seeking, he's determined to wrest it away, for nefarious purposes. Carnegie tries to manipulate his adopted daughter, Solara (Mila Kunis), as he controls her mother, Claudia (Jennifer Beals). The feisty Solara sees in Eli a way out of her oppressive existence. But Kunis seems miscast. Vacuous and far too glam, she looks as if she dropped in from a Ray-Ban commercial. In an interview, Washington once recounted a pivotal story from his youth. A patron at his mother's hair salon known locally for being able to predict the future told him he would speak to millions, in the way of a preacher. Washington, who produced the film, seems to have taken the words of this neighborhood fortuneteller to heart. But his monosyllabic performance falls short of moving us. He keeps to himself, either passively listening to music on earphones or aggressively carving off the hand of someone who crossed him. "You lay that hand on me again and you will not get it back," he informs a hooligan before applying his magical machete. So much for turning the other cheek. Despite his admiration for Scripture, Eli is vicious. He also is selective about on whom he bestows kindness. He endangers an elderly couple (Michael Gambon and Frances de la Tour) and is unmoved when they are slain. He'll protect Solara, a pretty young girl, but let her abused mother fend for herself. A didactic and humorless Western, Eli is too laborious for an action film and too brutal to be an inspirational tale. With its handsomely moody look, it seems more like an extended music video. Mostly, Eli is hampered by drab performances and a ponderous story. Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read more ||||| "The Book of Eli" plays out like the film version of a great graphic novel that no one ever got around to writing. 
 
 Its over-the-top violence is cartoonish at times, menacing at others - which is a good thing. And truly, if one must wander a barren, post-apocalyptic landscape with somebody, who better to wander with than Denzel Washington? 
 
 Washington is Eli, a man who has been walking for the 30 years since war laid waste to the planet. Survivors have long since turned desperate; imagine a cross between the worlds of "The Road" and "Mad Max" and you'll have an idea. It has gotten so grim that when strangers show up in a town, the first thing they're asked to do is hold out their hands, to see if they're steady. It seems that too much cannibalism leaves you with the shakes. 
 
 Along with the provisions Eli scrounges along the way, he carries, with great care, a book. To him, it's clearly more than that, though. It's a totem of sorts, and he guards it with his life. 
 
 There's much to guard it against, of course. But your run-of-the-mill roving savage is nothing compared with Carnegie (Gary Oldman). He runs the town that Eli finds himself in, and he wants the book, badly. He has, in fact, searched the world for it for years, sending bands of marauders out to find it. Its contents, he's convinced, are all he lacks to take over what's left of the world. 
 
 Eli, naturally, will have none of it. He hasn't guarded the book all this time to hand it over to a guy so obviously devious that he lacks only a handlebar mustache to twirl. So he leaves the town, albeit violently, with Solara (Mila Kunis) in tow; she's had enough of Carnegie's mistreatment of her and her mother, Claudia (Jennifer Beals). (Like some survivors of the war, Claudia was blinded; Carnegie isn't exactly the picture of compassion.) 
 
 A chase ensues, turning "The Book of Eli" into a mash-up of road trip action-adventure fare and that old reliable, the buddy movie. 
 
 The film is better when Eli is on his own, frankly; Kunis is a fine-enough actress, but this is Washington at his most tail-kicking, if occasionally comic-book, intense - brooding, silent until pushed too far. But Solara does give him someone to protect and, more importantly, someone to explain the book's contents and importance to (although most of the audience will have figured that out long before). 
 
 "The Book of Eli" is directed by the Hughes brothers, from a script by Gary Whitta. They bring the right touch to it, for the most part, though things get heavy-handed toward the end, when the message of the film is laid on a bit thick. 
 
 The fun here is in watching Washington, a sort of avenging angel, and Oldman, who has a ball with Carnegie's trumped-up accent and scheming. Throw in the stylized look of the ruined landscape and you have a most agreeable film. 
 
 One note: There is a bit of a twist, not obvious (at least not to me), which I pass along solely to heighten your observation of the film's details. It's more fun that way. 
 
 Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Twitter: goodyk. ||||| In “The Road,’’ the world has ended with a bang and a whimper. Author Cormac McCarthy’s lean prose has been lifted off the printed page and laid carefully into the soundtrack like antique china in a packing crate. “The clocks stopped at 1:17,’’ says the narrator. “A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions.’’ That’s all we know about the apocalypse and all we need to know. 
 
 The movie takes place in an America that has been turned into an ash heap, with skeletal human survivors picking their way across the cinders. Kept rigorously in the foreground are a Man (Viggo Mortensen) and a Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee), the latter born shortly after the end came and thus a creature exclusively of this fallen world. 
 
 The two are traveling from the interior to the coast before winter comes - that’s the action of the movie. That, and keeping clear of marauding bands of men who would gladly skin them and eat them. Also, as the boy reminds his father, the two “carry the fire,’’ whatever that means. It could refer to decency and goodness, the guttering spark of humanity. It could just mean they’re still alive. 
 
 “The Road’’ has been poured straight from McCarthy’s bleak bottle and brought to the screen by Australian John Hillcoat, who turned the 2005 Outback Western “The Proposition’’ into an epic of blasted landscapes and bloody motivations. He’s the man for the job, yet in adapting this harsh, unyielding book for the screen, Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall pull their punches the slightest degree and thus too much. 
 
 Or maybe movies can only dully visualize horrors the best writers hint at. Hillcoat’s “Road’’ is true to the book’s profoundly moving post-nuclear stoicism, but it can’t quite get those biblical cadences that make McCarthy such a transfixing read. The Coens managed it with “No Country for Old Men,’’ so it can be done, but you have to be willing to go all the way into the dark. As a colleague said after seeing this movie, you need to show the baby on the spit. “The Road’’ doesn’t dare, can’t dare, and is the lesser thing. 
 
 What’s on the screen is disturbing enough. (Even at that, it has taken a year for the Weinsteins, the producers and distributors of “The Road,’’ to get the nerve to release the film.) As the Man and the Boy drag their shopping cart across what’s left of America, the enormity of the cataclysm is glimpsed forward and backward. A wife (Charlize Theron) who may have been the braver for opting out. An impossibly old man (Robert Duvall) like a figure out of “Godot,’’ unable to go on but still going on. A trap door in a kitchen that leads to something you’d better not think about. 
 
 There are other basements and further revelations in “The Road,’’ but Hillcoat avoids jack-in-the-box suspense clichés; the movie plods with a literalism that’s at times too reverent (as is Nick Cave’s score, piling on a sensitive “mournfulness’’ both redundant and unnecessary). Mortensen underplays his role admirably, and Smit-McPhee is gratifyingly unactorly. At the movie’s best we see their relationship shift as something crucial and inarticulate is passed from one generation to the next. 
 
 Like all end-of-the-world fiction, “The Road’’ brings iconic meaning to the smallest of gestures. A single kindness becomes the hope of humanity; a cruel act the path to hell. If I have mixed feelings about the movie, it’s because Hillcoat honors the story’s minimalism without bringing his own sensibilities to bear on the material. He’s spooked by the responsibility, and maybe he’s right: When the director does add a single furry detail to the final scenes, it feels like a surrender to sentiment. 
 
 At the same time, everything about the film is a welcome rebuke to the happy-face apocalypse of “2012,’’ a movie that turns mass extinction into the Greatest Show on Earth. In “The Road,’’ what has been lost is recognized as infinitely precious; what’s left is bitter and our due. 
 
 Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movienation. 
 
 © Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
– The Book of Eli is almost certainly the best post-apocalypic Christian action movie you'll see this year, say critics, although many were put off by the preaching. The directors scored with the casting—Denzel Washington as a grizzled gunslinger protecting the world's last Bible—the fight scenes and the explosions, Derek Malcolm of the Evening Standard writes in a spoiler-laden review. But the message is overkill. "The result is like The Road rewritten by Sarah Palin for the greater good of Alaska and mankind." Bill Goodykoontz of the Arizona Republic was more tolerant, with the over-the-top violence putting him in mind of the film version of a never-written graphic novel. "If one must wander a barren, post-apocalyptic landscape with somebody," he asks, "who better to wander with than Denzel Washington?" Claudia Puig at USA Today agrees about Washington, but finds poetic psalms uttered amid stylized violence disconcerting. Religion and bloodshed." she writes, "make queasy entertainment partners." And Owen Glieberman of Entertainment Weekly thinks the post-apocalyptic road movie genre, now about 35 years old, is showing its age. Eli is a "ponderous dystopian bummer that might be described as The Road Warrior without car chases, or The Road without humanity," he writes.