I can't recommend The Book of Eli, because, to me, it wasn't an enjoyable experience. Without giving away the twists at the end, I can say that they turn the film from mediocre to bad. They did destroy the film for me, and they made me very upset after the film ended. While the acting was overall solid, the story and characters weren't, not allowing me to become involved in the story.
Mad Max meets Fifth Element meets Crouching Tiger meets Sixth Sense. Problem is, this film doesn't quite measure up to any of the other films from which it heavily borrows. There's been a purge and every copy of the most published book in the history of the world somehow got burned except his. You'll need some suspension of disbelief here. Worth seeing if you happen across it on cable but don't go out of your way to rent it.
I used to fantasize about being all alone in the world when I was a kid; from the sheer number of the movies on this topic it seems like I wasn't alone. This movie might break a record for "cliches per minute", I mean I guessed literally every step. It is done very lazily, it is more like a sketch in a comic-book series. Add the post-apocalyptic evangelism and yeah I really enjoyed it! If I really try to come up with a subtext: Apple is evil, as everything happened due to an out of battery iPod
This isn't all that interesting a movie, unless you have a hard on for post cataclysm movies, the importance of faith, or product placement. The product placement is actually a little disruptive in it's obviousness, they're the only things that are clean and easy to read. Personally I felt like the number of loaded weapons in use was a little excessive after 30 years of survivalist combat.
Despite not that successful story, I liked this film a lot. The visuals were stunning and leads did they job nicely. Revaluing a couple of aspects of the story would not do harm.
The first twenty minutes are abysmal - I thought I had accidentally stumbled onto a script originally meant for a bad-faux-Fallout video game - and once the plot got going, it relied much too heavily on its visual flair. But once the plot DID get going? A rated-R action film with major studio funding and bankable actors with a clear religious message? Oh, behave.
"Eli is nothing less than a prophet-superman on a divine mission, and while he naturally saves the word of God and, thus, humanity at large, he's powerless to salvage the film from its derivativeness." - Nick Schager