Babylon AD...Anybody?

I had intended to catch it, as I'm a fan of Vin Diesel and have seen most of his flicks (still need to see Multi-Facial, Strays & Find Me Guilty), and though I didn't have high expectations for it, I thought it could still be entertaining. However, when the director starts calling the movie awful, stories of high studio intervention emerge and reviews/reactions aren't good at all, I figured it'd be best just to wait for video.

 

Hitman did have a lot of reshoots and supposed studio intervention (though the movie turned out pretty decent, AFAI can tell)- but Vin dropped out of the Hitman movie to do Babylon A.D.

Babylon A.D. Director Mathieu Kassovitz Describes a Disastrous Production

Mathieu Kassovitz is pissed off. The French auteur, who first made waves in 1995 with La Haine, is supposed to be celebrating the passion project he's been nursing for the past five years. Instead -- the week before Babylon A.D. hits theaters -- he is nursing a grudge. "I'm very unhappy with the film," he says. "I never had a chance to do one scene the way it was written or the way I wanted it to be. The script wasn't respected. Bad producers, bad partners, it was a terrible experience."

The film, starring Vin Diesel, is an adaptation of the French novel Babylon Babies by Maurice Georges Dantec. It tells the story of a mercenary (Diesel) in the year 2019 who is hired to transport a woman and her guardian from Eastern Europe to New York. "The scope of the original book was quite amazing," says Kassovitz. "The author was very much into geopolitics and how the world is going to evolve. He saw that as wars evolve, it won't be just about territories any more, but money-driven politics. As a director it's something that's very attractive to do."

Diesel emphasizes the movie's theme of smuggling people across national borders. "This whole thing that's happening in Georgia right now is so fresh that no one has even asked about it yet," he says. "We're coming into an age where borders are closing, and I think that our society will be numb to it because of our freedom in the virtual world, our freedom in the Internet."

But according to Kassovitz, Babylon A.D. fails to deliver any of these messages. "It's pure violence and stupidity," he admits. "The movie is supposed to teach us that the education of our children will mean the future of our planet. All the action scenes had a goal: They were supposed to be driven by either a metaphysical point of view or experience for the characters... instead parts of the movie are like a bad episode of 24."

I should clairfy that the above latter statement was what my earleir post referred to-= the same article says:

To be fair, Kassovitz doesn't entirely hate the film. "I like the energy of it and I got some scenes I'm happy with," he says. "But I know what I had -- I had something much better in my hands but I just wasn't allowed to work." That the movie follows on the heels of such strong summer scifi options, will also prove challenging. "Babylon will probably have a good first weekend, but the second weekend we're going to lose 30%," says Kassovitz. "I don't see how people who went through all these amazing blockbusters like The Dark Knight and Iron Man this summer will take it."