Saturday, Aug. 30, 2008

'Babylon A.D.' a waste of time

By Edward Robertson, atomictown.com

As longtime readers know, I've got a thing for Vin Diesel.

All it took to seduce me was Pitch Black, a genre movie so perfect it practically showed up at my front door in a lady-elf costume with a quiver full of Charleston Chew and the eldritch kitchen knowledge of the Curry So Hot It Makes You Cry From Every Hole In Your Head. (Apparently that's my idea of a perfect date. I wish I hadn't known that.)

Diesel has since done...well...since then, he's done other movies that aren't so perfect. Like an abusive relationship, I just keep going back -- he only makes Fast & Furious because he loves me -- and, like with his latest, Babylon A.D., I just keep getting bruised.

As an exiled ex-mercenary in the dog-eating slums of future Russia, Vin Diesel has learned not to want much. But others still want him, among them his warlord former employer, who hauls Diesel in and offers him half a million dollars to smuggle Melanie Thierry through the ultra-strict borders of America.

Diesel takes the job, finding Thierry's accompanied by Michelle Yeoh, a tough nun who wants her ward no contact with the outside world. As they negotiate their way through the underworld of a crumbling Earth, Diesel begins to suspect Thierry is carrying something that, for better or worse, could change the fates of millions.

Not that, even after watching it, I'm at all sure what that her secret is. Oh, I heard the explanation, though it didn't arrive until long after I'd stopped caring. Thierry's kooky significance was laid out in words that, individually, I understood. Combined into sentences, however, they made so little sense the resulting crease in my brain is currently being explored by a crack team of the world's top canyonologists. (Don't expect to hear from them again. Dropping into my head, the only reports they're likely to send back are Event Horizon-style clips of eye-plucking and intestines-eating.)

Bad news: in the making-sense department, the rest of Babylon A.D. isn't much better than its gobbledegook finale.

Among the limitless ways you can start a movie, Vin Diesel eating dogs and slaughtering mercenaries is a fantastic kickoff. If you were to be ejected from the theater right then, the mystery of what comes next would likely drive you so crazy you too would soon be feeding on pets and blasting bad men into crimson ribbons. Got to love stories that plunge into the plot and trust you'll catch up later.

The key to leaping right into the action, though, is the idea that, sooner or later, you give us some goddamn idea why it's happening in the first place. Babylon A.D. builds a compelling enough world around its not-so-compelling characters. It's filled with slums and fights and rogue submarines and sneaky plans for Diesel to get through places he's not supposed to be. As for what's at stake, the reason we're watching this odyssey, screenwriter Eric Besnard (adapting from a French novel) doesn't give us our first clue for over an hour. In movie-time, that's like eight years.

Eight years of mounting confusion and frustration may work when it comes to marriage and career, but not in entertainment. It's almost like they're deliberately hiding the secret because it's so silly and insane that exposing us to it for any longer than necessary would be an act of medieval cruelty. It's either that or they simply have no clue about the story they're trying to tell.

Mustered against this awful, awful storytelling: two original action sequences and Diesel's animal magnetism, a force so potent theaters have to install lead-lined walls to prevent every pet in a three-mile radius from being sucked into a Death Star-sized furball.

Cursedly, us hairless apes need something more -- like a reason to care about the characters' struggles, or a backstory written by someone aware of the concepts of logic or plausibility, or an ending that (and there's really no better way to put this) doesn't suck. While you're watching it, Babylon A.D. isn't so bad. It's afterward, when you have to try to put the mess together for yourself, that it starts to feel like a 90-minute waste.

Grade: D