‘Babylon A.D.’ a futuristic mess

AFTER SWITCHING THINGS up with ‘The Pacifier’ and ‘Find Me Guilty,’ Vin Diesel returns to the action arena with ‘Babylon A.D.,’ a towering heap of nihilistic nonsense that plays like a cornball ‘Children of God.’-

By (Reuters)

Published: Tue 2 Sep 2008, 3:20 AM

Last updated: Wed 26 Apr 2023, 2:16 PM

A pet project of French filmmaker and sometime actor Mathieu Kassovitz, who along with Eric Besnard adapted the original novel ‘Babylon Babies’ by Maurice G. Dantec, the faux-Orwellian sci-fi thriller grows sillier as it goes along.-

Kassovitz has publicly criticised 20th Century Fox, claiming that it interfered with his vision, including lopping a good 20 minutes off of the final running time.-

Truth be told, it’s hard to regard the studio’s snipping as anything but an act of mercy given all the clunky dialogue and some truly unfortunate performances.-

Although the European production opened in France a week ago, here the picture has been fittingly saved for the traditional Labour Day weekend dump. It opened at No. 2 with estimated sales of $9.7 million for the three-day period.-

Vin does his Diesel thing as Toorop, a world-weary mercenary just trying to make an honest living in a post-nuclear wasteland.-

His latest assignment is to transport a gifted but troubled young woman named Aurora (Melanie Thierry) from a convent in Kazakhstan to New York by way of Alaska and Canada.-

Accompanying them is Aurora’s feisty guardian, Sister Rebeka (Michelle Yeoh), a Noelite nun with a murky past, which could account for her butt-kicking way of dealing with anything that crosses her path.-

They make for an admittedly oddball triumvirate, and the film starts off involvingly enough before everything starts to get bogged down in the encroaching outlandishness, ending in a dopey coda that effectively lands Diesel back in ‘Pacifier’ territory.-

Although Yeoh lends the film a greater emotional heft than it deserves, the same cannot be said for the usually faultless Charlotte Rampling and Gerard Depardieu, who veer garishly over the top as a self-serving Noelite high priestess and Toorop’s oily Kazakh engager, respectively.-

Shooting extensively in Prague, cinematographer Thierry Arbogast casts everyone in an unflattering gray pallor (blame it on that post-nuclear haze), while Kassovitz’s disjointed action sequences feel like they were airlifted in from some other movie.-