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Admittedly, Vin Diesel is definitely one of the first actor’s names that comes to mind when you’re thinking “Sci-fi action” role.  But just because Vin Diesel’s got the background to handle sci-fi action roles, does that necessarily mean that the movie around him is any good?  That’s what we’ll be checking into today with Babylon A.D.

This time, Vin’s going to be playing a guy with the unlikely name of Toorop, a mercenary sent by a crime figure in Russia to retrieve a young lady from a convent and escort her to America.  But of course it’s never so easy, and Toorop’s going to have to deal with a series of doublecrosses and various factions scrapping amongst each other to get their hands on his rather mysterious package.  Can he get the girl where she needs to be?  Or will he even bother once he finds out the incredible secret she’s carrying with her?

Under normal circumstances, I love dystopian fare.  I love the post-apocalyptic, the study of the differences between the normal everyday that we all know so well  and the survival of the fittest lifestyle that we see in the dystopia.  But Babylon A.D. isn’t really all that post-apocalyptic.  In fact, for an apocalypse the world is surprisingly unscathed.  Aside from the fact that Russia looks like a crater-pocked wonderland of irradiation, Canada and the United States both look like brilliantly lit megalopoli with lots of shiny new, well, everything.  Some apocalypse, says I.

Anyway, this movie shows the converse of the low-budget movie beautifully: the effects and such are just fantastic, but the movie itself suffers under a muddled script and really, REALLY confusing plot elements.  Watching the last half hour or so made me wonder if my disc skipped or something, because it feels like a MASSIVE chunk of the narrative just vanished or something.  Seriously–we go from one point to another seemingly years later without any kind of connecting thread in the narrative.

Sure, on a visual level, Babylon A.D. looks just amazing.  There’s this fantastic sequence in which a car flies through the air, dangling from a helicopter with a magnet for support.  It looks amazing.  It looks so amazing that it’s featured in the box art.  The cityscapes are amazing and laden with neon.  Everything in here is just BEAUTIFUL.  Even the Russian slum districts are exemplars of their gritty condition.

The problem, of course, is that this movie is well on its way to full-bore incomprehensibility and has about as much regard for a decent narrative storyline as a fish has for a newspaper.  Which is to say, of course, none at all.

This is one of those movies that it’s hard to trash because, frankly, it was fun to watch.  There were plenty of explosions and lots of gunplay and some absolutely beautiful scenery.  On a visual level this thing is AMAZING.  It’s only too bad that they couldn’t be bothered to actually make this wreck make sense.

Babylon A.D. proves unquestionably that beauty will only get you so far–in fact, all it’ll get you around here is a four out of ten.

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