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BABYLON A.D. Genre: Action, Adventure Director: Mathieu Kassovitz Starring: Vin Diesel, Michelle Yeoh, Melanie Thierry. Time: 90 minutes. When you pay your money and walk into the theatre for a Vin Diesel film, you expect a lot of hand-to-hand combat and a bunch of things will get blown up. And if that’s all you want, there is plenty of it in this film. With Sister Rebeka (Michelle Yeoh) by his side, Toorop (Vin Diesel) is paid to transport a young girl, Aurora (Mélanie Thierry) from a convent in Mongolia to New York City in 6 days, by Gorsky, a European mafia type (Gérard Depardieu, wearing a fake nose). And Toorop and Rebeka are determined to do that, even if it means finding every villainous punk in between to fight with. When they don’t have people to fight with, something blows up. This is not easy, as the time is somewhere ahead in the future after some kind of apocalypse that leaves everyone as either poor, dumb and transient, or a gangster, poor and transient. A lot of the area has already been blown up. The trek begins with Toorop being ferried to Mongolia in an old Russian limo carried suspended under a helicopter. At the monastery, Sister Rebeka and Aurora join him for the drive to a crowded train station. Aurora balks at the crowds (she was raised in a monastery, and is used to simpler venues), and runs off. Toorop and Rebeka catch her, but she refuses to go in the station. She says something about them dying if they go in. And guess what? The front of the train station blows up! But it is a positive thing as we realize there is something special about Aurora. And it clears the crowd nicely so they can run in and catch the train before it leaves. The trio arrives in a city in the north, and Toorop immediately takes them to a big disco bar with cage fighting. Of course it is crowded, but Aurora makes friends with the biggest, ugliest cage fighter in the place. And Toorop makes contact with his friend Finn, and purchases tickets for them to travel to America. This will result in two things for sure: Toorop will fight the big brawler and there’s trouble coming with their travel arrangements. Who buys tickets from some guy having supper in a disco bar? But we didn’t expect the gang of young guys who decide to take Aurora to her father, a person she thought was dead. So we get the first fight between the gang and Toorop and Rebeka. It ends after the big cage fighter takes Aurora in his cage to protect her. Can you guess who has to go in to extricate Aurora? And so begins the big cage fight which ends with Toorop disabling the giant by pulling him down on top of himself. This has to be seen to be believed. Then Aurora gets into the fight because she feels Toorop may hurt the big guy. So Toorop wins the fight, but loses the girl, as she decides to leave with the gang of young punks to go see her father. And then we see a great demonstration of the gang jumping all over the catwalks and piping to get away with Aurora, with Toorop and Rebeka running after them. And just so the movie doesn’t end here, Rebeka and Toorop catch them and Toorop shoots one because he didn’t comply with his request to let Aurora go. So the gang of toughs lets her stay and runs off, because they don’t want to get shot. Or perhaps they decided that girls who live in convents are not a lot of fun to hang with. Logic is not a part of the action in this movie. The trek continues on across an ice-covered sea with a crowd of pushy people trying to get out of Russia. Are things really better anywhere else? And just when we think Toorop, Aurora, Rebeka and their new friend, Finn, will walk across the Bearing Strait, a Russian submarine pops up through the ice. They need to board quickly before they get picked up on radar, and besides there is not enough room on board for all of them. So they fight their way on, and the sub begins to submerge. This really annoys Aurora, because the people outside will fall in the water and die. So she jumps to the control panel and stops the Russian nuclear sub from submerging. She grabs an officer’s pistol, just to ensure they take her seriously. So Toorop takes the pistol from her and things return to normal, and the journey continues. More things blow up, people fight and some get shot. A lot more of that and almost a love scene, too. To say any more would spoil it for those that want top see it for themselves. If you like it so far, you will enjoy the rest. The credits roll, but I stay put until the final fade out. I cannot believe the movie has ended. It had a lot of action packed into the ninety minutes, but I didn’t feel it could be over. What happened to the gangsters and the religious faction? They were not all killed. Something I found annoying was the cutting (editing) of the fight scenes. I expect fights to be choreographed to flow like a dance. In this movie, the cuts are too quick and the scenes filled with so many disjointed short pieces of unconnected action that the fights became a blur, and you couldn’t tell who was winning until one stopped moving. I don’t know if this has anything to do with the ten-minute shorter run time in North America than the original 100 minutes it screened as in France. Maybe the video will be a better view. The ending may have been abrupt due to the production going over budget and beyond the schedule, and being completed under the completion insurance. The Director complained that he was not allowed to film any scene they way he intended. Since his credits include the “Crimson Rivers” movies that I enjoyed, I tend to feel something did not go right. While the Director is usually the first to be blamed, if the Producers prevented him from filming his vision, then he still gets blamed although it is not all his fault. The special effects were excellent, yet somewhat excessive, and likely the cause of the cost over-run. On the other hand, much of the movie was shot in places where it is less expensive to film. Maybe they got caught up in the construction of the sets, rather than using existing locations (which cannot usually be done if you plan to blow them up.) The bottom line: See this movie if you like violence and lots of action, gunfire and big explosions, especially if you don’t care about the logic of the story so much. The ending may surprise you, although it will not be disclosed here. |