The Taste of Chicken is only Reputed

 And some men need to be killed--Gaosi Raditholo, Warrior

Although I want to spend more time on Pedro Aldomovar and the very rare quality of his rigorous discipline -- offering an almost seamless challenge to my responsive dread, reminding me almost of Otto Preminger, who was more obviously structuralist in his panoramic scope, I want to take a moment to discuss The Book of Eli in terms of an Inverse critic's contention that as a Hughes brothers film it’s underrated, despite its heavy Christian Everyman modality, being at its heart agnostic. The exposition of the script has its moments: the felines almost look like aliens from Mars, whereas the rat Eli feeds upon display of his hunting skills looks untouched, and these scenes may harken back to the old coinage “fat cat,” as representative of Gary Oldman’s character, and I’d argue that Jennifer Beale weaponizes her pre-flash blindness in an original fashion, and the motif of utilizing black liberation theology to carry the burden of white excesses for the sake of equally nascent white innocence, purity, this is something Denzel knows how to do, when he’s not otherwise embracing the pseudo militancy of Malcolm X. He plays a similar sacrificial agent in Man on Fire, but it doesn’t work in this genre, under the guidance of the Hughes, superimposed on a shocking and merciless post-radiation environment. The established religion and its most popular biblical text took centuries to evolve into the sectarian divisions with which we currently abide. If the rather vague backstory of how Christianity was blamed and purged for a nuclear deluge holds, and the young adults coming up out of hiding know nothing of it, then salvation through Christ couldn’t flourish once again, according to tradition. The Hughes brothers enjoy turning out a wry trick or two as auteurs, but Eli has a lot of bloodshed with little sensical return. It is a cop out.