Eli and His Book

By Jimmy Stewart
NewMan Magazine

Denzel Washington has long-since convinced movie audiences that onscreen he’s one of the baddest, most icy-hearted tough guys to roam the borderline of good vs. evil in Hollywood’s morality tales.

None are as “bad” (in the “first-rate” sense) at being vengeful as his Creasy in Man on Fire (2004); as good at being cold and unfeeling as his Alonzo Harris in Training Day (2001); or, now, as divinely determined to accomplish a mission as his Eli, the mysterious and terrifying emissary of hope he plays in his latest film, The Book of Eli, which opened Friday.

Eli drifts across the postwar, apocalyptic dustbowl of western America like a storm cloud, with a dark and menacing side that strikes as quickly as lightning on those who oppose him. He’s headed somewhere, but even he doesn’t know where. He’s been dispatched by a voice—God’s, he says—and charged with delivering the only existing copy of the Bible to a place where it can flourish, safe from those who seek to stamp it out or use it for their own end.

Walking “by faith and not by sight”—believing he has been chosen by and is being guided by heaven—he trudges onward while bearing a John the Baptist-style mission: He’s come, not to do his own will, but the will of the One who sent him.

But with Eli, unlike with John, if you oppose him, he’ll take your head off (literally). He will kill to protect the sacred book.

> Read the full review on NewMan Magazine.

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