Denzel Washington kicks butt as a mysterious road warrior toting the world’s last copy of the Bible across a post-apocalyptic North America in the never-boring “The Book of Eli.”
This is Allen and Albert Hughes’ first film since the underrated “From Hell” (2001). It’s far more fun than the thematically similar “The Road” — and it’s also better than you would suspect from a movie being dumped in January, the traditional studio deep freeze for problematic projects.
The film’s cool-looking desaturated look (not unlike “The Road”), plentiful action and Washington’s charismatic gravitas as the taciturn hero make it relatively easy to overlook the pretensions and implausibilities in the script by video-game creator Gary Whitta, which may contain more film references than “Inglourious Basterds.”
PHOTOS: DENZEL WASHINGTON’S MOST MEMORABLE ROLES
Washington’s Eli — a cross between Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, Mel Gibson’s Road Warrior and Mormon founder Joseph Smith — has spent the 30 years after a cataclysmic war walking toward the West Coast in the hope of re-creating civilization using his battered copy of the King James version of the Bible.
Expertly wielding a sword to pick his way through pillaging and raping marauders, Eli stops at in ruined town to get a charge for his iPod (from Tom Waits, yet).
There, he encounters another of the few remaining old-timers, the garrulous gang boss Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a bibliophile who covets Eli’s Bible so he can use it to refashion the world on his own avaricious terms.
A series of well staged and photographed (by Don Burgess) chases and shootouts involving Eli, Carnegie and his chief henchman (Ray Stevenson) follows.
The most amusing of these is set at the remote home (modeled on the one in “In Cold Blood”) of a pair of senior citizens who get along by eating their unsuspecting guests.
In a clever piece of casting, they are played by Michael Gambon (Dumbledore himself) and Frances de la Tour of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.”
Even better, the Hughes twins give the still-stunning “Flashdance” star Jennifer Beals her first big studio gig in years, a juicy supporting role as Carnegie’s long-suffering mistress, who is blind.
Mila Kunis (“Forgetting Sarah Marshall”) is miscast as her equally hot daughter, a sort of post-apocalyptic Valley Girl fascinated by stories of the old days who attaches herself to an unwilling Eli as his traveling companion.
The film features a couple of big surprise twists in its final reels.
One of them is carefully set up. But the other (involving a character played by Malcolm McDowell) is hard to swallow, though no more than the idea that residents of a world in chaos would be able to systematically destroy all the Bibles — because people supposedly blamed it for the apocalypse.
The filmmakers have an unusually persuasive star in Washington, who can sell lines like, “We had more than we needed” and “I walk by faith, not by sight.”
Will audiences go for this unusual mixture of religion and brutal violence? Well, look at “The Passion of the Christ.”
lou.lumenick@nypost.com