The Book of Eli, review

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Another week, another post-apocalyptic survival yarn. The Book of Eli is fitted out with regulation bleached cinematography and bombastic action set pieces, clomping heavily along with everyone wearing shades and whistling snatches of Ennio Morricone. Denzel Washington plays a scarred loner on the road who can lop your head off with a flick of his wrist and carries around a mysterious, totemic book with the power to change what's left of civilisation. Clue: it's not Jordan's autobiography.
The Hughes Brothers (From Hell, Menace II Society) intend this doomily pompous multiplex-filler as a futuristic western, but its feet are firmly planted in a big bucket of po-faced messianic cement. You wonder what Washington saw in it, but then the same could be said of everything he's made lately with Tony Scott. Gary Oldman, who plays a small-town tyrant with an eye on Denzel's bestseller, does "wearily authoritative baddy" as if pressing a switch.
There's one highlight, unless I hallucinated it: a brief, joyful and utterly random cameo from houseproud Frances de la Tour. Frances de la Tour! As the artillery rolls up to blow her dwelling to smithereens, her line about just having put out the best china bumps the whole farrago up a star.

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• The Book of Eli, review (telegraph.co.uk)