The most truly embarrassing thing about watching "Eli" is that I actually enjoyed it for about three quarters of its runtime. It held my attention. It was a decent horror/thriller kind of movie with a strange doctor and supernatural twist that seemed to be building to something pretty interesting. Rose and Paul are the parents of Eli. Eli has some type of strange disease that prevents him from going into the outside world unless he's wearing a suit to shield every inch of his body from the environment. They take him to Dr. Horn, who has developed some sort of a treatment for Eli's condition. But Dr. Horn doesn't seem to be exactly what she portrays herself as. Horn and the house in which she provides her "treatments" become the centre of the mystery, as Eli starts seeing strange, ghostly figures (real or hallucinations?) and the treatments seem to make him worse rather than better.
It was all adding up to a good and interesting thriller with some decent enough shocks thrown in - and then came the last quarter of the movie or so, when this simply took on completely unexpected (not to mention silly, ridiculous, and foolish) religious angle that turned it into little more than yet another ho-hum "spawn of Satan" movie. I suppose in some ways it deserves credit for not telegraphing that right from the start, but I just felt kind of let down when the story took such a weird and unexpected turn.
I'd have to say that the performances also were a bit of a letdown. Not horrible, but no one's performance really stood out to me either, and I'd have to say that aside from Lili Taylor (who played Dr. Horn) I really didn't recognize any of the lead actors in this. All in all, this turned out to be a big disappointment. (3/10)
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