Director: Mathieu Kassovitz
Starring: Vin Diesel, Michelle Yeoh, Gérard Depardieu, Mélanie Thierry
Tagline: "Mankind already has a protector."
Random Trivia: In traditional FOX fashion, the director and studio feuded throughout the production of scenes, script, and run time, hacking off over an hour of the film in the final cut. Due to the feud the movie was given almost no promotion. There wasn't much of a tagline for the Western release of the movie; the one you see a few lines up is translated from the Spanish release.
Poor Vin Diesel. The guy was just born at the wrong time. Had he broken out in the 80s, he would have had a string of massive hits by now. Instead, he's got Pitch Black, the oft-forgotten Boiler Room, and... The Fast and the Furious. Which I personally hated, but it raked in cash at the box office, as did part four recently.
Vin actually seems to care about making movies though. Sure, he's another action star clone, but he dropped out of Hitman to make Babylon A.D. - only to see it raped by the studio. He was passionate about the Riddick character, and is still pushing for another chance at that one. He has tried for ages to get the story of Hannibal the Conqueror made, and he was in Saving Private Ryan, for fuck's sake!
What I'm getting at here is, Babylon A.D. is a massive failure, but that's not Vin Diesel's fault. It's not really any of the actor's fault. It's basically FOX being FOX, raping the movie, hacking scenes, trying to get in an American friendly run-time, and on top of that, a script that could have been much tighter. Given this was based on a novel, Babylon Babies, how hard could that have been? Don't answer that...
Diesel plays Toorop, a mercenary charged with transporting a girl, Aurora (Mélanie Thierry) and her keeper (Michelle Yeoh as a member of a sect of nuns) from Russia to America somewhere in the not-to-distant future. But distant enough to have cool effects scenes, when affordable. Just not so distant that FOX would have to break the bank, you know.
See? Isn't that cool? It's New York City! See we took some actual skyline shots and then edited in some cool looking buildings and lights...
Gorsky (an unrecognizable Gérard Depardieu) is the mobster who hires him. Along the way, various parties - the girl's father, and the sect of nuns to which Yeoh's Sister Rebeka belongs, intervene.
Think Transporter, in the future. The first one. And there's actual chemistry between Diesel and Thierry! Michelle Yeoh isn't half bad either. But the plot is just too damn tired... see, Aurora is carrying a virus, supposedly. Oh, and she happens to have been created to fulfill the prophecy of the religious sect who raised her, so that she can give birth via immaculate conception and make the religion legitimate - through a complete, genetically engineered hoax.
Great. Cloning. So that hasn't been done to death.
I was high enough to enjoy Diesel and Thierry on screen. And I'm curious about the one hour or more of footage which FOX hacked out. Sadly, though, we'll never know if this could have been any good since they reportedly interfered as the movie was shooting and changed actual scenes! For fuck's sake FOX, STOP. You raped X-Men into the grave. You shit out the Wolverine spin-off! You've completely tarnished both the Alien and Predator franchises in not one but two complete suck-fests, and now you've decided to begin bastardizing stand-alone films as well...
Overall rating: 1/4 Baked (2 out of 5)
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