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After switching things up with The Pacifier and Find Me Guilty, Vin Diesel returns to the action arena with Babylon A.D., a heap of nihilistic nonsense.
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.
Crying foul
Kassovitz has publicly dissed 20th Century Fox, claiming that it interfered with his vision, including lopping 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 the clunky dialogue and some truly unfortunate performances.
In the US, 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 (Dh35.6 million) for the three-day period.
Yawn plot
Vin does his Diesel thing as Toorop, a world-weary mercenary just trying to make an honest living in a postnuclear 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 guardian, Sister Rebeka (Michelle Yeoh), a Noelite nun with a murky past, which could account for her way of dealing with everything.
Oddball triumverate
They make for an 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 lands Diesel in Pacifier territory.
Although Yeoh lends the film a greater emotional heft, the same cannot be said for Charlotte Rampling and Gerard Depardieu, who veer garishly over the top as a high priestess and Toorop’s oily Kazakh engager.
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