The Book of Eli 2009, Channel 5, 9pm.

Anyone familiar with Channel 5 knows that Moses walking through the desert for 40 years, with adverts about manna, and cool daddy god, he’d have taken considerably longer, probably about 120 years plus VAT. So I braced myself up and girded my loins to watch this. I must admit to being a bit of an apocalypse fan. And let’s face it every Sunday is. I liked Cormac Mc Carthy’s ‘The Road’, the book that is, and the film, less so. I missed the first twenty minutes, which was ok, probably about fifteen were adverts. I quickly got the gist of the story. Denzel Washington is Eli the good guy. There were lots of bad guys killing and raping, but nothing too much to be concerned about, because none of them were the real bad-bad guy. They were just misunderstood. Some of them couldn’t even read. Gary Oldman plays the bad-bad guy, whose name I can’t remember. To do justice to how bad he was we’ll call him Gary Oldman. The bad-bad guy wants something that only the good guy can give him. In this case it’s a book. And I’m not giving too much away by saying it’s the Holy Bible. We know this, because the non-sex interest, Mila Kunis becomes the first apocalyptical disciple. As she can’t read and Gary’s routinely torturing her mother, she shows Gary what kind of book Denziel is carry by putting one index finger over the other in a sign of the cross. Denziel and his book go on the run. Mila tags along so that Denziel can tell her about his wanderings and his mission. There’s no naughty-naughty, because he’s goody-goody. So they hang about in their designer shades waiting for Gary to turn up. He duly does, takes the book, takes Mila and shoots Denziel in the stomach. For anyone else that would be the end, but hey, it’s the big D. Mila hooks a vehicle. They drive away and hey hit the next new civilisation with everything in it, including McDonalds. Big D doesn’t have the book, but, hey, he does. He’s memorised it. Shades of Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’ here. A civilisation built on books can’t be a bad thing. I’ve got one very like it in my bedroom. What I don’t have is the bid D lying on my bed as someone acts as scribe and writes down Genesis, Exodus, Numbers…The kick at the end is bad guy Gary can’t read his version. It’s in braille. I’m not sure I got that bit. Was big D blind the whole time? Or was he just able to read braille in the same way that he could run through bullets, get shot and recover and disappear from locked rooms? These are the mysteries.