LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - After switching things up with "The Pacifier" and "Find Me Guilty," Vin Diesel returns to the action arena with "Babylon A.D.," a towering peck of nihilistic nonsense that plays like a cornball "Children of God."
A pet project of French filmmaker and sometime doer Mathieu Kassovitz, who along with Eric Besnard altered the original novel "Babylon Babies" by Maurice G. Dantec, the faux-Orwellian sci-fi thriller grows sillier as it goes along.
Kassovitz has publicly dissed 20th Century Fox, claiming that it interfered with his imaginativeness, including lopping a good 20 minutes off of the final running time.
Truth be told, it's hard to respect the studio's snipping as anything only an act of mercy given all the ungainly dialogue and some really unfortunate performances.
Although the European production opened in France a hebdomad ago, here the icon has been fittingly saved for the traditional Labor Day weekend dump. It opened at No. 2 with estimated sales of $9.7 million for the three-day period.
Vin does his Diesel thing as Toorop, a world-weary mercenary just trying to make an reliable living in a postnuclear wasteland.
His latest assignment is to transport a gifted but troubled young adult female named Aurora (Melanie Thierry) from a convent in Kazakhstan to New York by way of Alaska and Canada.
Accompanying them is Aurora's feisty shielder, Sister Rebeka (Michelle Yeoh), a Noelite nun with a mirky past, which could account for her butt-kicking way of dealings with anything that crosses her path.�
More information
