Babylon A.D.

Vin Diesel and Gérard Depardieu look at some futuristic gadget in Babylon A.D. (pay special attention to background hookers to prove Depardieu’s pimp status)

As Printed in The Lumberjack on September 4, 2008

by Gary Sundt

I walked into the movie theater tonight knowing two things: 1) four new movies were coming out, and 2) three of the four were going to be pretty terrible. The one film that had a glimmer of hope to it, the Don Cheadle thriller Traitor, was going to be that which nobody was going to see. Accordingly, I chose what I assumed would be the least painful. I chose Babylon A.D. It stars Vin Diesel.

Let me explain my reasoning here. Vin Diesel has talent. I know it’s in there somewhere. He was great in Pitch Black, and the saving grace of Find Me Guilty. Perhaps charismatic is the wrong word, but there is within him the ability to do good work. Also, the other two choices, College and Disaster Movie, were almost certainly going to be vomit-inducing affairs, thus Babylon A.D. it was.

So there I was watching Babylon A.D. The flick starts off by spouting the same droll monologue we’ve seen in the trailers, with the same imagery to boot. Then we cut to Toorop (Diesel) walking through a Russian village to some bombastic rap song, pimping a raincoat like it was the new black. Then some action happens (it doesn’t really matter), and the audience is subsequently riddled with videogame-level dialogue that explains some mercenary mission involving getting a girl to the United States.

So Toorop goes to pick up the girl. Her name is Aurora, and she lives in a convent, and Sister Rebeka (Michelle Yeoh) is her guardian. After a bit of obligatory discourse between the mercenary and the sister that confirms Toorop’s abrasive mannerisms, we meet Aurora (Melanie Thierry). It’s the kind of introduction where time slows down, with a faint singing of choirgirls. The type of introduction that insists impending doom. But we’ll get to that later.

Wait – let’s get to the doom now. Aurora has apparently never been outside the convent, and so the brutality of the world is a bit jarring. She freaks out. She runs away. Toorop and Sister Reb go after her. Then a building blows up. Aurora knew it was going to happen. What’s the deal? Is there mystical hoopajoop afoot?

Maybe, maybe not. I think I can safely say I had no idea what was happening after this point in the story. And believe me, I tried. I really tried. It is my job as a film critic to try. But there’s nothing here. Babylon A.D. is nothing but empty dialogue and random action sequences accompanied by an overbearing soundtrack.

Director Matthew Kassovitz has obviously watched his fair share of science fiction, in particular Blade Runner and The Fifth Element. The action sequences, however orthodox, are directed with some skill. The alternate future he has created is visually all encompassing; I especially liked the apartment they visit in the flick’s third act, with its rotating door-walls and television that can’t be turned off (you can change the channel).

The failure here is really the script by Eric Besnard. He has watched the same movies as Kassovitz, but he has also played a lot of videogames. The dialogue here could be ripped right from Grand Theft Auto III, and the plot developments are about as motivated as when Bowser would steal Peach at the end of every fourth-level in NES’s Super Mario Bros. It’s a first draft that was given a budget, which is a crime all-too-common in today’s rush of quick-dollar movie making.

Accordingly, the actors go into default mode. Diesel grunts his manly man grunt, because what’s an action star to do without a script? Yeoh goes into commander mode, her go-to acting method when she’s just doing it for a paycheck. And while Thierry is a relatively new face, her character is required to scream and cry – the same motivations that child actors are delegated. The film’s biggest challenge is to milk tears out of Diesel, to no avail I might add. How can a man cry when he has no real motivation? Not everybody is Ben Affleck.

Whether Babylon A.D. is the kind of bad that is quoted for eternity is hard to say. I will admit to having found my own perverse joy in shouting “WHAT IS WRONG WITH HER?!?” for the last few days. But I don’t think that’s the fate of this sci-fi cinematic blunder. No, save the possibility of cult status, this one is doomed to sit in the $1.99 bin at Walgreens. It’s a fate probably shared by Disaster Movie, College and Traitor.

Running time: 90 minutes. Directed by Matthew Kassovitz. Produced by Kassovitz and Alain Goldman. Written by Eric Besnard. Starring Vin Diesel, Michelle Yeoh, Melanie Thierry, Gerard Depardieu and Charlotte Rampling. A Twentieth Century Fox release. Rated PG-13