“DVD reviews: 'Book of Eli,' 'When in Rome,' 'Youth in Revolt'”

DVD reviews: 'Book of Eli,' 'When in Rome,' 'Youth in Revolt'

Posted: 15 Jun 2010 02:51 AM PDT

This weeks major home video releases include a teen sex comedy with Michael Cera, a romantic comedy featuring Kristen Bell and Josh Duhamel and an apocalyptic drama starring Denzel Washington.

The Book of Eli

2 stars (out of four)
Rated R for some brutal violence and language
Warner Brothers
Available on: DVD and Blu-ray

Lately, there have been a lot of movies considering what it might be like for Earth to go through an apocalypse. They started last year with 2012 and The Road and continued this year with Legion and The Book of Eli.

Although each film contemplates the end of humanity as we know it, they approach the subject differently. 2012 and Legion are special effects-heavy projects that are more interested in flashy visuals than actual storytelling. The Road is a thinking persons movie that is focused on humankinds reaction to the devastation rather than the destruction itself, and The Book of Eli falls somewhere between. Denzel Washington stars as the title character, a solitary drifter who viewers meet as hes trudging across a desolate North American landscape pockmarked by craters. His mission, we learn, is to make it to the west coast of the United States with what may be the last copy of the King James Bible.

Eli believes he will find other people on the coast who can help him spread the word of the Bible, but his journey is treacherous because much of North America has devolved into a murderous wasteland. Still, he has made strides because he is smart and skilled in combat.

Alas, it seems Eli has met his match when he wanders into a makeshift town ruled by a power hungry man named Carnegie (Gary Oldman). As it turns out, Carnegie has been searching for a copy of the Bible for years, and when he learns that Eli has one, he decides to do whatever it takes to possess it.

The directing team of brothers Albert and Allen Hughes (From Hell, Menace II Society) present Book of Eli as one part action adventure and one part social commentary, but they come up short on the latter. Eli is entertaining, in large part due to Washingtons commanding performance, but its ideas arent as well focused as those in The Road. Viewers learn, for instance, that Carnegie is a learned man and he wants the Bible because he believes he can use it to control people. The Hughes brothers dont, however, explain why he doesnt simply create his own version of the Bible since he has no theological loyalty to the book.

DVD New release

Tuesday, June 15, 2010