If you think you’ve somehow seen this film before as it opens on a mostly black-and-white, post-apocalyptical landscape of dead trees and ruins, it’s because you have—you’ve seen the exact same thing in the Mad Max films, and just a few weeks ago in The Road. That slapping thud you hear is the sound of the Hughes brothers, who directed the film, striking themselves on the forehead and shouting, “Oh snap! Why couldn’t we get Denzel’s film on the calendar before that damn Viggo Mortensen movie showed up?”

Since the Hughes brothers, the filmmakers of considerable talent who brought you From Hell, Dead Presidents and Menace II Society, haven’t made a film in about nine years, you’d think they might have had something a little more original brewing. For heaven’s sake, they’re able to attract actors the caliber of Johnny Depp and Denzel Washington to their projects. And in the Book of Eli, they managed to get Gary Oldman in there as well, with Jennifer Beals, Michael Gambon, Mila Kunis, Tom Waits and Ray Stevenson thrown in for fun. You’d think there might be something interesting in the mix, but you’d be wrong.

It’s nothing but a belabored futuristic Western, with Denzel playing a righteous dude whose mission it is to carry the world’s only copy of the King James Bible out West. He seems to have mad super powers that enable him to hastily dispense with anyone who tries to stand in his way or take the book from him. Exactly like in The Road, he must also avoid wily cannibals, who, since there’s a shortage of food and water, care nothing for the good book, but would just as soon eat him as look at him. Oldman, however, plays a villain of a different color. He presides over a lawless Western town, and wants the book for the words in it—words that can turn men’s hearts and convince them to humbly obey, which they do anyway, because he controls the area’s only fresh water source.

The big reveal at the end almost makes enduring this film worthwhile. Almost. It drags on far longer than it should, with a new hero rising, and one can just see visions of a sequel dancing in the Hughes brothers’ heads. Something tells me this isn’t going to happen, however. And it doesn’t take a prophet to foresee it.

Rated R

Lisa Johnson Mandell