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 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 ||||| "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. ||||| Here's a philosophical vignette from "The Last Station," Michael Hoffman's evocation of the last year of Tolstoy's life. The great man's new personal secretary, 23-year-old Valentin (James McAvoy), is working by candlelight in his spartan bedroom when a stunning young woman, Masha (Kerry Condon), opens the door. She, like he, is a committed Tolstoyan, a member of a utopian community that Tolstoy has established on the grounds of his grand estate to celebrate the virtues of communal property, passive resistance, vegetarianism and celibate love. Valentin's commitment to celibacy—and vegetables—has been earnest and thus far unwavering, but the philosophy of the free-thinking Masha is that love should be celebrated with body and soul, so her seduction begins. The entire film is a seduction, one that draws us into a vanished world where Count Leo Tolstoy and his wife of 48 years, Countess Sofya, come to joyous, tempestuous life in a matched pair of magnificent performances by Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren. 
 
 A scene from "The Last Sation," a new biographical film about Leo Tolstoy starring Christopher Plummer and Hellen Mirren. 
 
 This Tolstoy is larger than life in the eyes of that world—he's the most famous writer on the face of the planet—yet warmly and disarmingly life-size in Mr. Plummer's portrayal. He is, by his own admission, an erratic Tolstoyan. Taking Valentin on a leisurely stroll through a birch forest, he recalls longingly a passionate affair of the flesh with a Tartar girl who is by now a white-haired old woman, if she isn't dead. He still adores Sofya, and succumbs to her blandishments in another seduction scene that speaks eloquently for longevity. But he can neither fathom nor endure his wife's ceaseless sniping at the way he sees contemporary society ("You think because the peasants are poor they're morally superior") or presents himself to it ("Why do you insist on dressing like a man who looks after the sheep? You're a count, for God's sake!") 
 
 Enlarge Image Close Sony Pictures Classics 'The Last Station' also stars Paul Giamatti and James McAvoy as followers of the great novelist. 
 
 In fact, Sofya is the titan of the piece. Rather than a literary lion, she's an enchanting lioness who gets all the best lines, and goes for the dramatic jugular. Ms. Mirren goes for laughs, gasps, grins and tears, and gets them all. Having found a vulnerable woman in "The Queen," she finds a virago in this countess—at one point Sofya writhes on the floor of her husband's study while she rages in flamboyant fury against him and his chief disciple, the wily Chertkov, who is played by Paul Giamatti. (Mr. Giamatti is awfully good, though he might have flattened a bit of his archness and dispensed with a few twirls of Chertkov's waxed mustache.) But the scene, part Feydeau farce and part antic "Antigone," is a stark reminder that the countess is vulnerable too. Her nemesis Chertkov, the zealous keeper of Tolstoy's flame, wants the old man to bequeath his estate and all his royalties to the Russian people, leaving Sofya with nothing. 
 
 Enlarge Image Close Sony Pictures Classics Helen Mirren (left) as Leo Tolstoy's wife, Countess Sofya. 
 
 "The Last Station" was adapted from the novel by Jay Parini, and its structure is fairly intricate—parallel love stories (Tolstoy and Sofya, Valentin and Masha), plus interlocking triangles (Sofya and Chertkov contending for Tolstoy's soul, Sofya and Chertkov pumping Valentin for information about one another's grip on Tolstoy's property). Before and after anything else, though, Mr. Hoffman's film is a deeply satisfying entertainment that recognizes no distinction between lively and profound. (I like to think his license for stylish silliness dates back to the making of his 1991 soap-opera opus "Soapdish.") It's full of gorgeous vistas—the cinematographer was Sebastian Edschmid—as well as intriguing details: reporters and photographers, even newsreel photographers, hanging on Tolstoy's every word; a gramophone that repeats Tolstoy's words, to his displeasure (he's something of a Luddite); a delicate, wordless moment when Valentin first enters Tolstoy's study, sees annotated pages strewn across his desk and touches one reverentially. (Mr. McAvoy's performance is superb in its own right.) 
 
 The movie's title, with its religious overtones, is a literal reference to the railway station where Leo Tolstoy died a few days after leaving his wife and home, presumably to become a wandering ascetic (though he brought his personal physician with him). The little station, in the middle of a vast Russian nowhere, quickly became the site of a protomedia frenzy when telegraph wires flashed news of Tolstoy's illness, and Sofya came to see her beloved husband for the last time. The story's climax turns out to be anticlimactic, a predictable contrivance that pits the countess, for the last time, against Chertkov, who wants to manage Tolstoy's death as he managed his life. But the ending seems contrived only in contrast to what has gone before—a lovely quicksilver version of literary history, with the accent on young love that emerges unbidden, and old love that endures. 
 
 Warner Bros. Denzel Washington as the titular wanderer in 'The Book of Eli.' 
 
 'The Book of Eli' 
 
 Religious overtones slowly grow into the dominant tone of "The Book of Eli," a bizarre and sententious pastiche—part Samurai legend, part postapocalyptic western with a surprise ending—starring Denzel Washington as a wanderer heading westward with a Bible in his dusty backpack. It's not just any Bible, but the last one on earth; and Eli isn't just any wanderer, but a master swordsman/archer/gunslinger who'll do anything that's required to protect his book. The story requires a greater leap of faith than I was willing or able to muster, since Eli is also a saintly pilgrim on a God-given mission to save a ruined world. 
 
 Worse movies than this one have been taken seriously, and "The Book of Eli," which is being marketed heavily though not exclusively to Christian audiences, has the virtue of audacity; it's "The Road" with a message of hope. The directors were the Hughes brothers, Allen and Albert (the twins' last film, shot almost a decade ago, was the Jack the Ripper thriller "From Hell"), working from a script by Gary Whitta, and the elaborate production was given a distinctive sepia look by the cinematographer Don Burgess. Mr. Washington manages to sustain a heroic aura in the face of some serious silliness. Gary Oldman is scruffily impressive—and, praise be, occasionally funny—as Carnegie, an outlaw turned local despot who's determined to separate Eli from his book because, in a perverse way, he recognizes the Bible's power: "It's a weapon," Carnegie says, "aimed right at the weak and the desperate." 
 
 A Scene From 'Book of Eli' 1:30 Watch a scene from "The Book of Eli," a new film starring Denzel Washington as a drifter carrying a special book through a post-Apocalyptic wasteland. Video courtesy of Warner Bros. 
 
 But the movie is aimed at two targets moving in different directions—people of faith and fans of violence. While the religious content makes itself felt, sometimes strongly, the heavy action quotient—the story of Eli the slasher—tears feelings to tatters. Jennifer Beals is Carnegie's blind wife, Claudia, and Mila Kunis is Solara, his sexy stepdaughter. In the midst of a veritable valley of death, Solara looks and sounds like a Valley Girl. 
 
 Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com 
 
 DVD FOCUS 'Inside Man' (2006) Denzel Washington is an unflappable hostage negotiator and Christopher Plummer is a banker with a secret in this film, directed by Spike Lee, that's partly a police procedural and partly a comic fantasy that revels in the richness of New York City's polyglot culture. Clive Owen is Dalton, a brainy criminal who strides into a bank's Wall Street branch and announces that he and three friends "are making a very large withdrawal." The screenplay, by Russell Gewirtz, operates confidently in action mode but is always willing to pause for an oddball encounter, a rambling story or a great, tossed-off joke. 'The Man Who Would Be King' (1975) Christopher Plummer is Rudyard Kipling in John Huston's peerless version of the classic Kipling story. While Huston dreamed of having Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart play the leads, that pairing was not to be. Once you've seen the movie, though, it's next to impossible to imagine anyone else in the roles but the stars who play them: Sean Connery and Michael Caine as Daniel and Peachy, two worldly ex-sergeants looking for unworldly wealth in the mountain kingdom of Kafiristan. Saeed Jaffrey is the desperately decent Billy Fish. The cinematographer was Oswald Morris, and Maurice Jarre wrote the music. 'Calendar Girls' (2003) Helen Mirren co-stars with Julie Walters in "Calendar Girls," a not-nude iteration of "The Full Monty" (which was hardly a show-all extravaganza). The clever script, by Juliette Towhidi and Tim Firth, takes off from a real-life story. In 1999 a group of middle-age women in a small English town sought to raise a few pounds for charity by publishing a calendar with whimsical photos of themselves, in the nude, performing such traditionally domestic tasks as arranging flowers. The calendar, of course, became an international hit. The movie is very funny and surprisingly likable until it goes Hollywood. -- Joe Morgenstern
– 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.