Babylon A. D.

[Amazon Link]
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[2.0
stars] [IMDb Link]

Well, I have a good excuse: it had Michelle Yeoh in it. She's awesome.

Vin Diesel plays Toorop; as the movie opens, he's barely surviving in a bleakly anarchic future Kazakhstan. But he's a man with a past, and one of his old employers (Gérard Depardieu, unrecognizable) is some sort of Kazakh gangster/warloard. Toorop is coerced into escorting a mysterious teenage girl and her nun handler (that's Ms. Yeoh) from a "Noelite" monastery through Siberia, across the Bering Strait, through North America, and into New York. There's a lot of shooting, kicking, explosions, and the like on the way.

I found myself liking the very beginning of this movie, as the grime and grittiness of the Kazakh dystopia was deftly pictured, and Vin Diesel was his usual hard-boiled self. But somewhere during the first hour, I think the filmmakers ran out of money, and the script kind of ran out of sense. So things got stupider, more pretentious, and much less interesting. So, fail.

Charlotte Rampling makes a late appearance as high priestess of the Noelite sect. I'm old enough to remember when Charlotte Rampling's looks were striking enough to be considered sexy. Now she's just really, really, scary looking.


Last Modified 2024-01-31 5:34 AM EDT