Babylon A.D.’ is beyond belief

Every week or so, it seems, Bob Glatzer – the critic whom my wife and I do “Movies 101” with on Spokane Public Radio – comes up with a new nominee for “worst film of the year.” I’m never exactly sure whether the films are really that bad or whether they deserve harsher criticism for the perceived sin of being almost good.

Either way, Glatzer clearly hasn’t seen “Babylon A.D.,” the Vin Diesel vehicle that I just go out of. If he had, he would be claiming that it ranks among the worst films of 2008. And this time he would have good reason for claiming so.

“Babylon A.D.” was directed by the French director Mathieu Kassovitz (his father is a Hungarian who emigrated to France during the 1956 revolution). It’s based on the novel “Babylon Babies” by French author Maurice George Dantec and is the third of his so-called “cyberpunk” books.

I found a New York Times review of the novel, which said, “ ‘Babylon Babies,’ an under-appreciated novel by French punk-rocker-turned-writer Maurice G. Dantec, deserves a wider audience, and not just because its author is frequently mentioned in the same breath as Michel Houellebecq (and definitely not because the book is being adapted into a movie starring Vin Diesel)… what makes this novel (translated by Noura Wedell) so haunting is its vision of a near future in which society has fractured along every possible national, tribal and sectarian fault line.”

Sounds great, and I think I’ll order a copy right now. So what, then, could be wrong with the movie? Well, portraying anarchy doesn’t mean just putting a bunch of busy images on the screen, especially when those images aren’t explained in any way that makes sense. The best authors ( Philip K. Dick ) and directors (Ridley Scott or George Miller) know that.

Take any of the best post-apocalypse films, “The Road Warrior,” for example, of “Blade Runner”: Each one gives us not only an overarching plot line, but it gives us enough context in which to understand our protagonist and his motivations. One man, living in a dying world, seeks revenge for the deaths of his wife and child; another man hunts down cyborgs who, programmed to fail in a few short years, search for their creator in a desperate attempt to obtain more time.

In Kassovitz’s film, there’s simply no there there. Not only does he give us no real reason to empathize with the protagonist – a man named Toorop – but he gives us even less of a reason to like him. And not much else makes sense either, much beyond the same-old, same-old clichﾎs that you’re bound to find in the latest Casper Van Dien feature.

And besides, Kassovitz depends on an actor, Diesel, who hasn’t had a hit since, arguably, 2000’s “Pitch Black” (though I do consider 2002’s “xXx” a guilty pleasure). Diesel throws everything off, his attempts to turn everything into “King Lear” proving annoying and advancing the story not a whit.

In the end, “Babylon A.D.” inexplicably ends, leaving open a superhighway-size path to a sequel. But when a film makes as little sense as Kassovitz’s does, one installment is more than enough.

Below: Vin Diesel stars as a mercenary named Toorop in Mathieu Kassovitz’s film “Babylon A.D.”

Associated Press photo