How Vin Diesel continues to command top billing as a star of big-budget action films remains—like Stonehenge—one of those perennial mysteries. This deliberately obtuse Children of Men rip-off takes place in the near future during a bleak period of global unrest in which hardboiled mercenary Toorop (Vin Diesel) accepts the job of escorting a woman named Aurora (Mélanie Thierry) and her chaperone Sister Rebeka (Michelle Yeoh) from Central Asia to New York. Aurora is pregnant with twins who just might be the Messiahs foretold by members of an influential religious cult. Obviously, their birth will upset the prevailing order, so Toorop and his charges become targets at every stop along the way. Based on the 1999 novel Babylon Babies (which appeared seven years after P.D. James' Children of Men) by French sci-fi author Maurice G. Dantec, the storyline here is unnecessarily dense, individual character motivations are vague, and the action scenes—while extravagantly mounted—are so badly edited as to be nigh incoherent. Most of the blame must fall on director Mathieu Kassovitz (Gothika), who seems hell-bent on making all the wrong choices when staging scenes. Gerard Depardieu and Charlotte Rampling are wasted in small character roles, while the lion's share of screen time goes to dopey Diesel and vapid Thierry. Not recommended. [Note: DVD/Blu-ray extras include a 12-minute “Arctic Escape” featurette, an 11-minute “Babylon Babies” featurette on the novel, the eight-minute featurette “Hummers in Flight” on the car chase sequence (8 min.), the production featurette “Fit for the Screen” (7 min.),the five-minute digital graphic novel prequel “Genesis of Aurora,” a three-minute deleted scene, commercials, and trailers. Bottom line: a solid extras package for a lame sci-fi thriller.] (E. Hulse)
Babylon A.D.
Fox, 90 min., PG-13, DVD: $29.99, Blu-ray: $39.99, Jan. 6 Volume 24, Issue 1
Babylon A.D.
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As of March 2022, Video Librarian has changed from a four-star rating system to a five-star one. This change allows our reviewers to have a wider range of critical viewpoints, as well as to synchronize with Google’s rating structure. This change affects all reviews from March 2022 onwards. All reviews from before this period will still retain their original rating. Future film submissions will be considered our new 1-5 star criteria.
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