The Book of Eli (2010)

Sometimes it is just more fun to write about a movie you hated than about one you loved.  Over the past few years I've seen plenty of terrible movies, but none quite stick out in my mind quite like The Book of Eli.  Transformers 2?  Terribly awful, perhaps the worst train wreck of a movie ever.  But it didn't pretend to be smart.  Twilight?  Ghastly.  But again, it had no posturing, no pretensions of being anything more than an insipid movie about an insipid book.

The Book of Eli however wanted you to think it was smart and clever.  It wanted to be "meaningful."  It wanted to be memorable.  It succeeded at that I suppose, because I still think of it every time I think of the worst movies of all time.

Now, few movies get literally everything wrong (go Transformers 2!).  And so The Book of Eli does have some things going for it.  The action is top notch, bringing a somewhat comic book-inspired aesthetic to the visual flair and a gritty and brutal violence that is felt in the gut of the viewer.  The acting a bit above grade powered by Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman.  Other technical aspects are just fine.

But the story!  Merciful Minerva (Wonder Woman ftw!!), there are so many plot holes there is literally nothing left!  Warning to those who have not seen it and still wish to: here there be spoilers!

In the post-apocalyptic future, Denzel Washington plays a man walking across America carrying the last Bible.  All other copies of the Bible had been destroyed by bad guys except this one.  This leads to plot hole #1: There are right now more than 6 billion copies of the Bible in the world, so good luck destroying them all.  If the Roman Emperors couldn't do it 2000 years ago, chances are a Mad Max wannabe couldn't either.  So Eli has the last Bible, and he is walking from one side of America to the other, guarding his treasure with his post-apocalyptic ninja skills that he picked up somewhere somehow.  He's been at this for 30 years.  Why it has taken 30 years is not explained, as we can learn on Google maps that walking from New York to San Francisco can be done in less than 2 months.  Perhaps he decided to take the New York-to-Greenland-to-Panama-to-Seattle-to-San Francisco route.  Anyway, Gary Oldman finds out he has the Bible and tries to get it from him to use to subjugate the people.  Denzel fights him off with his super ninja skills, including his dead shot pistol skills.  Skip to the end, and you find out that the book he was carrying was a Braille Bible, and Eli has been blind the whole time.  That's right, a blind guy can shoot a bullseye at over 30 yards with a pistol and fight with deadly efficiency using a knife.  My friends, that's a plot hole you can lose an entire county in.

It doesn't stop there.  The following are just a few of my smaller gripes with Eli:

• Movies usually like to explain how people get out of locked rooms.  Not Eli.  Eli don't need no explanations.  Both he and the lead girl can walk through heavy locked metal doors without any clue regarding how they did it.  She's locked in there! Cut to next scene, where she's walking down the road!
• How does anyone in this wasteland survive?  There is only concrete and dust!  No plants!  
• Oh, so the Bible Eli has is Braille?  Did anyone tell the writers that Braille books are far longer than normal ones?  A Braille Bible is about 17-18 volumes and takes up 60 inches of  shelf space.  Eli apparently was carrying only part of the Bible.
• The apocalypse must be great for the skin, because every woman in the movie has perfect skin.  And teeth.  And great fashion sense.
• Eating human meat (cannibalization) does not make your hands shake, as this movie claims.  Don't ask me how I know this.
• I'm perfectly ok with the idea that the sun causes problems for people in the apocalypse, like blindness and such.  But why do the birds and animals seem to have no problem?  Is the sun only bad for people?
• Eli claims faith doesn't make sense.  Sorry Eli, this movie is the only thing that doesn't make sense.  Faith is a reasonable action taken based on evidence.
• For someone who can quote the whole Bible perfectly at the end of the movie, he sure can't quote it accurately during the rest of the movie!  He doesn't even summarize it well!  And he certainly hasn't learned "Thou shalt not kill" very well either.
• Eli has a bow.  In some scenes.  Tell me, where does Eli store that bow when he's not using it?  Does it fold up in his backpack?  
• We get that the iPod is important.  But does the movie care to explain why?  Nope.  Nor do we get any indication of how the thing can still hold a charge after all these years.

So that's The Book of Eli, perhaps the greatest example of stupid plot holes in movie history.

Entertainment: 5/10

Artistic Value: 1/10

Technical Merit: 5/10

Overall: 3/10