--- title: American Savior: Denzel Washington in Book of Eli description: In the Hughes brothers' future-shock Book of Eli, Denzel Washington adds action to his old screen magic canonical: https://time.com/archive/6690385/american-savior-denzel-washington-in-book-of-eli/ author: Richard Corliss article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2010-01-25T05:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-27T17:10:27.198Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: American Savior: Denzel Washington in Book of Eli og:description: In the Hughes brothers' future-shock Book of Eli, Denzel Washington adds action to his old screen magic og:url: https://time.com/archive/6690385/american-savior-denzel-washington-in-book-of-eli/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0a7dbf8b915f5baa/698a4804b3fce3e8860cbaa4/360_eli_0111.jpg?branch=production&width=360&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 360 og:image:height: 203 og:image:alt: 360_eli_0111.jpg og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: American Savior: Denzel Washington in Book of Eli twitter:description: In the Hughes brothers' future-shock Book of Eli, Denzel Washington adds action to his old screen magic twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0a7dbf8b915f5baa/698a4804b3fce3e8860cbaa4/360_eli_0111.jpg?branch=production&width=360&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # American Savior: Denzel Washington in Book of Eli > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) Jan 25, 2010 5:00 AM UTC  Denzel Washington stars as Eli in the new film, The Book of Eli. Denzel Washington stars as Eli in the new film, The Book of Eli. Warner Bros. Pictures by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) Jan 25, 2010 5:00 AM UTC In movies he’s been an angel, an inspirational teacher and the Black Muslim icon Malcolm X. He’s played soldiers, policemen, coaches, doctors. He’s spoken the words of Shakespeare and Spike Lee. Even as a killer, in American Gangster, he carried himself like a cool chief executive, the mayor of the Harlem underworld. He has the gift of making melodrama seem plausible just because he’s doing it. And always in Denzel Washington’s screen demeanor is the sense of power withheld, of anger internalized. He doesn’t shout or strut, doesn’t need to. Why raise your voice when a good stare from that handsome, solemn face will quiet any adversary? That is the mark of cinema charisma: an assurance that articulates itself through sheer presence. A hero has it; so does a god. Washington, 55, is some kind of deity — a man of God if not the Lord himself — in The Book of Eli, the grand and grimy post-apocalyptic western from the twin auteurs Allen and Albert Hughes. They must have recognized an anomaly in Washington’s quarter-century star career: that, like Tom Hanks but not many others, he’s been a major movie male without anchoring an action franchise. (He hasn’t even made a sequel, though there may soon be one to Inside Man.) A two-time Oscar winner — Best Actor for Training Day, Best Supporting Actor for Glory — he’s had his share of hits, but mostly in the genre of smart adult melodrama. He is a figure of smoldering passion, not lightning action. [(See the top 10 movie performances of 2009.)](https://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1945379%5F1944194,00.html) Eli pushes the actor into Wesley Snipes territory, as he plays a figure who channels both a taciturn John Wayne hero and the implacable warriors of Japanese samurai films like Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and the Zatoichi blind-swordsman series — all of which fed on, and in turn fed, the Hollywood notion of solitary, preternatural machismo. The new movie taps Washington’s coiled strength, transforms that asset into a weapon and gives him the chance to kick ass for righteousness’ sake. Gary Whitta’s script, set 30 years after civilization screeched to a halt when a great “flash” (maybe a devastating bomb or the wrath of God) filled the sky, imagines a charred American Southwest littered with dead trees, debris, corpses — a landscape not even WALL-E could clean up. The desaturated color scheme makes the whole world look as if it were left outside to die, and it was. Marauding punks prey on solitary travelers for water, food and clothing. With all industrial and agricultural sectors in shambles, the fear-market system applies: survival of the meanest. Or, in Eli’s case, the purest. He’s a good man with a Good Book — a rare extant copy of the Bible, whose possession he will defend with his life. [(See the top 10 movies of 2009.)](https://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1945379%5F1943915,00.html) In a long tracking shot at the start of the film, a feral cat prowls this wasteland until it is felled by a slow-motion arrow. The silent, heavily bearded archer moves on into a shack, where a man has hanged himself. The archer notices the dead man’s boots and appropriates them. He cooks himself a meal — fillet of feline — and feeds a morsel of it to a stray rat. Back on the road, he is set upon by four highwaymen. Out comes his sword, and in an instant, they are decapitated, eviscerated, kaput. Later he sees another gang abusing a woman but doesn’t intervene. “Stay on the path,” he tells himself. He is the superman as loner, able to survive in a hostile world because he’s handy with sword, fist, rifle and ax. And because he’s Denzel Washington. [See the best pictures of 2009.](https://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1946595,00.html) [See 25 people who mattered in 2009.](https://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1946375%5F1946333,00.html) Movies have envisioned the post-apocalypse so often, from the Mad Max films to the current Daybreakers (directed by another set of twins, Peter and Michael Spierig) and The Road, that by now the future can seem passé. But the Detroit-born Hughes brothers have the bona fides to put dreadful war zones on the screen. When they were just 20, they made Menace II Society, a scalding view of gang-plagued Los Angeles. Their next film, Dead Presidents, depicted the scars of Vietnam on a returning vet. After the documentary American Pimp, they sent Johnny Depp in pursuit of Jack the Ripper in the 2001 From Hell, based on an Alan Moore graphic novel. Their films exude a tone of lawlessness and despair. The message: whether it’s Victorian London or a saloon town 30 years hence, sooner or later every place is Detroit. In the tradition of the solo cowboy who needs a scurvy town to clean up, one corpse at a time, Eli lands in an outpost run by the wily, chatty Carnegie (Gary Oldman, having infectious fun with the villain role) and overrun by his gang. One of the few readers in a world of illiterates, Carnegie wants what Eli has, for he believes that the Bible’s rhetoric can subdue men more successfully than fear and firearms can. “They’ll do exactly what I tell ’em,” he says, “if the words are from the Book.” [(See pictures of Detroit’s beautiful, horrible decline.)](https://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1882089,00.html) In this town, humanity is represented by Claudia (Jennifer Beals), Carnegie’s mistress and hostage, and her daughter Solara (Mila Kunis); they will be less Eli’s allies than his baggage as he fights off Carnegie’s gunmen. Not that Eli needs much help. A half-dozen men in the saloon, a dozen or more in a Main Street shoot-out, the whole Carnegie regiment ready to reduce to rubble the rural house Eli has holed up in with a grizzled couple (Brit theatrical giants Michael Gambon and Frances de la Tour) and Solara — none of these armies can bring him down. One dastard gets it in the groin; another, through the neck. In a tense face-off, Carnegie’s main henchman, Redridge (Ray Stevenson), has a gun on the unarmed Eli, who goes eye to eye with him and disarms him with a glance. God Told Him To That moment lends Eli the aura of a divinity. Is he God, making a personal inspection of what humanity has done to his earth? Could be: Eli is the Semitic word for a supreme being. He says that after the big flash, a voice told him to take the Bible and go West, so he might be Brigham Young leading the Mormons to Utah, or any number of cult leaders who found acolytes in California. Eli could also be a jihadist, using a holy book as his moral cue to annihilate the infidels. He acknowledges that the Bible can work on men in tonic or toxic ways: “Some people said this was the reason for the war in the first place.” But he thinks the Word is worth bringing to a new generation. Maybe he’s Jesus, but with an Old Testament fury — he brings peace with the sword. All these theological metaphors make the movie a potential magnet for Evangelical Christians — the first violent, R-rated Passion play since Mel Gibson’s in 2004\. Gibson had his own action franchises: the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon films. The Book of Eli needn’t be that. It’s fine as it is: a smart drama that marks a welcome return for the Hughes brothers while indelibly establishing the image of Denzel Washington as one tough, sanctified dude. [See the 10 worst video game movies.](https://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1851626%5F1851846,00.html) [See the 100 best movies of all time.](https://www.time.com/time/2005/100movies/) ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6690385/american-savior-denzel-washington-in-book-of-eli/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6690385/american-savior-denzel-washington-in-book-of-eli/"},"headline":"American Savior: Denzel Washington in Book of Eli","datePublished":"2010-01-25T05:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-27T17:10:27.198Z","description":"In the Hughes brothers' future-shock Book of Eli, Denzel Washington adds action to his old screen magic","url":"https://time.com/archive/6690385/american-savior-denzel-washington-in-book-of-eli/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0a7dbf8b915f5baa/698a4804b3fce3e8860cbaa4/360_eli_0111.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Richard Corliss","url":"https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt0a7dbf8b915f5baa/698a4804b3fce3e8860cbaa4/360_eli_0111.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"360_eli_0111.jpg","caption":"Denzel Washington stars as Eli in the new film, The Book of Eli.","creditText":"Warner Bros. 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