Babylon A.D.

2008

Director: Mathieu Kassovitz
Action directors: Bob Brown, Alian Figlarz
Producers: Mathieu Kassovitz, Alain Goldman
Writer: Eric Besnard
Cinematography: Thierry Arbogast
Music: The RZA, Atli Ovarsson
Editing: Benjamin Well

Stars: Vin Diesel, Michelle Yeoh, Melanie Thierry, Gerard Depardieu, Charlotte Rampling, Mark Strong

Rated PG-13 for violence and language

The end of the summer movie season is usually the time when studios release some of the dregs that are clogging up their release pipes. The thinking behind this is that they can sneak past a few potential bombs while most people are busy enjoying the last few days of summer and not worry about sullying the studio's name. Once in a while, you might get a good release hiding amongst the cinematic chum, but after viewing Babylon A.D., this is most definitely not the case.

The film stars Vin Diesel, who despite his cool name, has not been able to find his groove as an action star -- and Babylon A.D.'s mess of a plot isn't going to help matters any. Vin plays Toorop, a mercenary living in some sort of post-apocalyptic Russia, who is hired to escort a girl (Melanie Thierry) and her nun "bodyguard" (Michelle Yeoh) to America. It turns out the girl has some sort of psychic powers due to some pre-birth tinkering of her fetus. This makes her a hot commodity to a new religion looking for a messiah.

Or something to that effect. Babylon A.D.'s story doesn't really make a lick of sense and has some huge holes that are never explained, such as the girl becoming pregant even though she's a virgin. Now you might be saying, "why concentrate so much on the plot in an action movie?" Well, for what is supposed to be an action movie, there's really not much of it, and what's there suffers from camerawork that is shot too close and editing that depends on far too many quick cuts.

The summer of 2008 had some very strong entries like Iron Man and The Dark Knight. Compared to those movies, which truly raised the bar for action films, Babylon A.D. comes off as extremely amatuerish and limp. It has all of the marks of a straight-to-DVD release, like an almost washed-up star and a crew of mostly unknowns shooting in random cheap European countries, and if you're at all interested in this movie, you should probably just wait for the inevitable multiple showings on a cable station like Spike or TNT. Babylon A.D. simply isn't worth the price of a movie ticket.

RATING: 4