Smaller: Not Always Better!

The Book of Eli gives us yet another post-apocalyptic end of the world saga. This time, Eli (Denzel Washington) walks through barren wasteland carrying a machete and a Bible. It's almost like Eli travels in the footsteps of Viggo Mortensen, who recently set down his own apocalyptic travelogue in The Road. With the washed-out landscape, deserted and decaying skyways, junked cars, rotting skeletons and onramps to nowhere, both have the feel of post nuclear Westerns. Shot in New Mexico with the Sony RED digital camera, Book of Eli, at the very least features some impressive massacre scenes.
In Eli, due to some divine intervention, the title character must walk “west.” Referring to “before the flash,” a holy war of sorts that blew up the sun, everyone now wears protective (and sometimes designer) sunglasses and no one person under 40 knows how to read or has ever seen a television. Water is scarce and people have turned to cannibalism, but it's all about Eli and his journey. This includes fending off marauding Road Warrior-like thugs (who rape, murder and pillage around every turn), dispatching people with his mystical fighting skills, ending up in a town that resembles a post-apocalyptic Deadwood, adopting an apprentice against his better judgment, going head – to-head with an evil villain and, of course, spreading the gospel. Eli, a true Bible thumper, severs limbs and decapitates with a ninja assassin's flair while trying to remain righteous. Eli doesn't turn the other cheek, but he will chop one off.

Now here's something strange: Extraordinary Measures is essentially a bad television movie played out on a big screen – a banal exercise in paint-by-numbers drama – and then, unbeknownst to itself, it's also a powerful cinematic critique of the American medical industrial complex.
From the director of What Happens In Vegas, this is an idiot savant of a movie. Utterly oblivious to the recent political battles over health care reform, Extraordinary Measures has blundered onto the scene, and by the dullness of its narrative, far exceeds the comparatively mild attempts of Sicko and John Q in exposing the American health care system's dark side.