In Babylon AD Vin Diesel, the slowest-moving action hero in movies, travels over land and under water from somewhere in the former Soviet Union to New York City in the company of a nun (Michelle Yeoh, 楊紫瓊) and a young woman named Aurora (Melanie Thierry). Aurora is either some kind of biological weapon or some kind of messianic figure.
I won’t say which, though this odd, solemn disaster has made itself spoiler-proof by refusing to make any sense at all. The only explicable thing about Babylon AD is that it was not screened in advance for critics. Our judgments, in any case, may be superfluous, since the director, Mathieu Kassovitz, has already publicly described it as “pure violence and stupidity.”
He did not mean that in a good way, and while I hate to contradict an artist’s assessment of his own work — Kassovitz blames 20th Century Fox for compromising his political and metaphysical vision — a purely violent and stupid film might have been kind of fun. This one, while it has some nice futuristic design touches (including grubby East Bloc housing projects and a splendidly renovated Harlem brownstone), combines badly executed action sequences with mystic mumbo-jumbo that I suspect not even a two-disc director’s cut DVD could make comprehensible.
Kassovitz, whose acting credits include Amelie and Munich, might earn the benefit of the doubt for some of his earlier work as a director, or at least for La Haine, his scrappy urban melodrama from 1995. On the other hand, he is also the director of Gothika, a Halle Berry horror vehicle that, now that I think of it, makes me look a bit more kindly on Babylon AD.
Which at least has an interesting cast: not only Yeoh, one of the world’s great movie stars, but also Charlotte Rampling as a high priestess and Gerard Depardieu (wearing the most superfluous prosthetic nose extension in film history) as a Russian mobster. What they are doing here is not for me to say, though perhaps Diesel, in an early voice-over, offers a clue.
“I learned something today,” says his character, a tattooed mercenary with the curious name Toorop. “You can’t always walk away.” I’m sure he wishes otherwise. I certainly do.
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