BOOK OF ELI MOVIE REVIEW

Book of Eli, the ambitious, thought-provoking new thriller from brothers Albert and Allen Hughes (From Hell, Dead Presidents), is in many ways an anomaly in modern Hollywood. It’s a post-apocalyptic story that’s neither a remake nor an adaptation; its dystopian future is entirely devoid of zombies or vampires; and its core message, spiked with heavy amounts of faith and religion, borders on evangelical. Oh, and it’s absurdly violent, too. How this movie got made, I’ll never know.

The film is set approximately thirty years after a catastrophic war has decimated the planet, leaving its surface charred and inhospitable to the lucky few who managed to survive. A handful of dirty, decrepit, debauched cities host the last remnants of civilization; in between them, gangs of crazed cannibals, distinguishable by traits similar to those of meth addicts (shaky hands, bad skin, missing teeth, bizarre fashion sense, etc.), roam the bleak, unforgiving landscape, preying upon those foolish enough to travel alone.

Out of this infinite desert emerges a pious, solitary badass, Eli (Denzel Washington), wielding a vicious machete and carrying a rare book which, if placed in the right hands, could hold the key to civilization’s redemption. But in the greedy paws of unscrupulous folks like Carnegie (Gary Oldman), the tyrant of a lawless frontier town, the book can also be a powerful tool for subjugating the ignorant masses. Which is why Carnegie declares a veritable fatwa on Eli’s ass when he learns of his precious cargo, forcing the peace-loving missionary to brandish his blade in the service of the Lord.

Whatever their own religious beliefs, the Hughes brothers should get on their knees and thank God for Denzel, who almost singlehandedly makes Book of Eli’s hyper-stylized, incongruous mixture of B-movie splatter and high-minded spiritual hokum palpable. Together with Oldman, the film’s other fine lead, he imbues the often preposterous plot with just enough credibility to keep it afloat. Seriously, other than Denzel, who else could solemnly recite Psalm 23 in one scene, then go and carve up — literally — a handful of henchmen in the next, without eliciting howls of laughter from a movie audience? The only other actor who immediately comes to mind is a pre-meltdown Mel Gibson. Maybe.

But even a miracle worker like Denzel can’t prevent the wreckage wrought by Mila Kunis, a likable enough actress who is disastrously miscast in the role of Solara, a rough-hewn hooker-slave who eventually becomes Eli’s disciple. With her perfect complexion, shrill intonation and Valley Girl cadence, Kunis feels glaringly out of place in Book of Eli's coarse, brutal futureworld — and she can't hope to measure up to the likes of titans Washington and Oldman.

YOUTH IN REVOLT MOVIE REVIEW

Hormones can wreak havoc on the teenage brain, causing it to contemplate all sorts of mischief in its drive to sate its carnal appetite. In the R-rated teen comedy Youth in Revolt, directed by Miguel Arteta and starring Michael Cera (Juno, Superbad) and newcomer Portia Doubleday, the volatile combo becomes downright hazardous.

The “teen” label is highly debatable here, as Youth in Revolt’s hapless protagonist, Nick (Cera), and his impish paramour, Sheeni (Doubleday), are both too quick-witted and hyper-articulate to qualify as mere high school sophomores. It’s the Juno debate: I don’t know if any teens actually talk like this, but if they do, I guarantee none are as sophisticated or attractive as our Nick and Sheeni. No, Youth in Revolt is more like a hipster’s whimsical projection of what his adolescence might have looked like if it weren’t spent buried in an issue of McSweeney’s. And on that level — as a sort of Porky’s for intellectuals — it actually works.

Though his vocabulary is highly advanced, 16-year-old Nick shares one important trait in common with most boys his age: He’d like to lose his virginity, preferably as soon as possible. But his chances seem woefully slim until he meets Sheeni, an attractive girl possessing a mind as sharp as his, but without the nagging insecurity and sexual inhibition. To top it off, Sheeni appears more than willing to escort Nick into manhood; circumstances, however, conspire to thwart them at nearly every turn, driving Nick to increasingly desperate lengths to be joined with her. Egged on by an imaginary wingman, his shrewdly Machiavellian alter ego Francois Dillinger (also Cera), Nick’s actions escalate from mere lies and manipulation to arson and auto theft with startling speed, and he soon earns the attention of the authorities.

With the cops hot on his trail, Nick spends the last third of the film in a sort of hormone-fueled version of The Fugitive, racing against time to crack the case of his virginity before being dragged away to juvenile hall. It’s one of the many odd shifts in tone that plague Youth in Revolt, as Arteta can’t seem to decide between raunchy sex comedy and surreal coming-of-age tale. Thankfully, he’s able to fall back on the talents of Cera and Doubleday, whose amusing and endearing — if suspiciously mature — repartee carries the film.

DAYBREAKERS MOVIE REVIEW

Hollywood’s burgeoning library of vampire flicks gets a bloody new addition this week with Daybreakers, a grisly horror-thriller that adds a dystopian twist to the increasingly well-worn bloodsucker mythos. If Twilight is the Romeo and Juliet of the vampire genre, Daybreakers hopes to be its Children of Men. But hope, as they say, is not a plan. Nor is it a particularly effective filmmaking technique.

Set 10 years in the future, Daybreakers envisions a world in which a nasty plague has turned all but a tiny fraction of the planet’s population into vampires. But instead of descending into the kind of violent anarchy one might expect after such a catastrophic event, folks have adjusted surprisingly well, retrofitting their lives to accommodate their vampiric needs. (Potentially fatal sunlight, for example, is avoided with an elaborate system of underground walkways and computerized sunrise alerts.)

But all is not well in the future vampire world. The supply of uninfected human blood, upon which the civilization depends to survive, is dwindling rapidly, and attempts to synthesize it, led by Ethan Hawke’s reluctant biotech researcher Edward Dalton, have thus far proved disastrously ineffective. (A side effect of the latest blood substitute, for example, is an exploding head. Ouch!)

Dressed in a drab black suit and hat, his alabaster vampire complexion rendered even more pale by his moral objection to drinking human blood (he subsists instead on vastly inferior pig blood), Hawke’s character looks something like a Hasidic heroin addict (see below). Appalled by his company’s lucrative side business of imprisoning uninfected humans in vast blood farms (akin to the warehouses of “batteries” of The Matrix), he revolts against his smoothly sinister boss (Sam Neill) and joins a rag-tag resistance group led by a homespun mercenary (Willem Dafoe) who claims to have discovered the cure to vampirism.

LEAP YEAR MOVIE REVIEW

The majesty of the Emerald Isle is on full display in Leap Year, an opposites attract romantic comedy starring Amy Adams (Julie & Julia, Enchanted) and Matthew Goode (A Single Man, Watchmen). Director Anand Tucker (Shopgirl, Hilary and Jackie), shooting entirely on location in Ireland, takes us on a whirlwind tour of the country’s breathtaking landscape, reveling in its fabled fairy-tale charm.

Pity, then, that such a magnificent setting is so mercilessly defaced by Leap Year’s unrelenting mediocrity. The film’s dubious premise, testing the already loose limits of rom-com believability, casts Adams as Anna, a type-A career girl who flies to Ireland intending to pop the question to her feet-dragging boyfriend on February 29th, aka Leap Day. Why Leap Day? Because, according to some idiotic old Irish tradition, that’s when women are allowed to do such things. (Click here to watch Adams herself try to explain the plot.)

Unfortunately for Anna, weather problems force her plane to land far away from Dublin and her would-be fiance. Trapped in a tiny coastal town with no reliable transportation at her disposal, she enlists the help of a scruffy, abrasive barkeep named Declan (Goode) to drive her cross-country so she can reach her destination by the 29th. And thus begins the traditional rom-com mating ritual of sexually-charged bickering followed by moments of abrupt, awkward intimacy.

While watching Leap Year, I swear I could hear the Irish countryside quietly weeping as it witnessed Goode and Adams slog through the film's succession of trite misadventures, the talented actors straining in vain to manufacture some semblance of romantic chemistry as an assortment of jolly Waking Ned Devine types futilely spurred them on. Oh, if only Greenpeace could have intervened and put a halt to such wanton environmental desecration. It's the worst thing to come out of Ireland since The Cranberries.