/ 5 September 2008

A plot gone missing

Babylon AD

French director Matthieu Kassovitz made the gritty urban drama La Haine before moving into genre: a cop thriller with The Crimson Rivers and psycho-horror with Gothika. Here he takes on the post-apocalyptic action adventure, and the results are mixed. Vin Diesel plays a mercenary charged with transporting a young woman across a hostile landscape, from an isolated nunnery to an overcrowded indoor Thunderdome and via icy wastes to New York.

Michelle Yeoh is on hand to assist; Charlotte Rampling is the high priestess who’s paying for the trip through a subcontracted Gerard Depardieu. There is potential here for a decent futuristic thriller, with some good sequences, and the film does look good in that grungy-dystopia way that must be a delight to set dressers, but it doesn’t come together.

At the screening I attended, two reels got sequentially muddled, and it’s possible that another reel was left out altogether. Either way, I emerged confused, unsatisfied and with a sense of something missing. At least Babylon AD has an unprecedented scene in which a heavily made-up Depardieu goes face to face with Diesel and actually makes Diesel seem good-looking by comparison. — Shaun de Waal