Vin Diesel's new action movie, "Babylon A.D.," is pure violence and stupidity.
And you don't have to take my word for it. That's its have director talking.
In fact, "consummate violence and stupidity" is a address quote from an question filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz gave amctv.com. Along with such other choice observations as that Fox cut the plastic film extensively just to catch a PG-13 rating and that it now plays "like a bad sequence of '24.' "
The movie � which, surprise surprise, open Friday without advance screenings � plays like a mix of an upscale "The Transporter" and a dumbed-down "Children of Men," with Diesel as an end-of-days mercenary skilled at getting citizenry across borders. His latest charge: Melanie Thierry, a spooky young woman world Health Organization looks like a baby Uma Thurman. His up-to-the-minute assignment: Get her across the world, and safely into Manhattan.
The only problem is that her billionaire mom, who's paying for this little trip, is not precisely on oral presentation terms with her dad, who's a kind of mad cyborg scientist. And their little disagreement before long turns into the mother of all custody battles, complete with teams of black-garbed henchmen, international incidents, public specs and tactical nuclear weapons.
Kassovitz, who antecedently made the well-regarded "La Haine" and "The Crimson Rivers" abroad � and the intimately incomprehensible "Gothika" here � has a definite optic sense. But the flick is too chaotic to allow you to take account it; as soon as we depart taking in the wonders of a complicated go under, he begins blowing it up.
Diesel, the Michelin Man of activity movies, grunts and grumbles and sends people to the hospital, but ne'er to a great deal effect. (There's an interesting Diesel moving-picture show here � but unfortunately it's the trailer to the new "The Fast and the Furious" continuation that plays at the start.) Among the purposeless actors are Michelle Yeoh as a karate-chopping conical buoy, and Charlotte Rampling as a cultish high priestess. (Or the head of a makeup company � I was never quite sure.) Gerard Depardieu picks up a check, also, as a Russian mobster with his own tank.
He'll need all the armor plating he can get to survive this. The movie belike made more than sense before the studio started cutting � it's hard to imagine it made less � only it's saturated chaos now, climaxing in a gunbattle fought by a angered, anonymous army of hands in business enterprise suits. Perhaps they were the investors. When the film in conclusion limped to a close, the other people in the audience I saw it with � all nine of them � seemed uncertain of whether or non to leave.
"Is it over?" someone asked hopefully.
Oh yea. Before it even began.
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