“Little bit of catching up to do. Yesterday’s schedule was so jammed I couldnt find any write up time. Original plan was to do this during the Globes yesterday, but I ended up getting really into it until power went out on the whole block during the last hour. *sigh*
I shoulda known better than to get really excited for a January released movie. That’s always a setup for disappointment. From the trailer Book of Eli looked so promising. Yes I know the whole post apocalyptic thing is a bit over done (just in the past year: The Road, 9, Terminator: Salvation, plus a few other more subtle ones). But what could go wrong with Denzel kicking some butt? Lots actually.
My main gripe, well there’s a few actually. One is that it was so \m/ slow paced. Yes the action sequences were good (I _really_ loved the silhouette one) but they were few, far-between, and fleeting. The rest of the time, things were just progressing really slowly. Felt like nothing much was really happening the rest of the time. I recognize that a lot of that was to establish the feel of how sparsely populated the world was, but really we got the point. Move on please.
The other big gripe is that it was trying to hard to be meaningful. The irony there being that it woulda been, if they hadn’t pushed. The last ten minutes were amazing. While a lot of it was predictable, there was something I hadn’t forseen and it made me wanna watch the whole thing again with that knowledge. But up until that point, there were lots of vague references attempting to be universal. And the somewhat minimal dialogue was somewhat mediocre at best.
The saddest part was that such a great cast was wasted on it. Love Denzel and this was one of his most badass roles to date. Gary Oldman makes a wonderfully evil baddie, if only he had better dialogue to work with. Mila Kunis is another fave of mine, but she didnt have much to do. Surprise appearance by Malcom Macdowell, which made me happy, although it was distracting as I tried to figure out if it was Malcom Macdowell or Terrance Stamp cause I always have the damnest time trying to tell them apart.
Ultimately, I think it was kinda worth it for the end (which earned it an extra half point) but it just takes a long ass while to get there
The Book of Eli – \m/ \m/ \n