Babylon A.D. (2008)
Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz
A veteran-turned-mercenary is hired to take a young woman with a secret from post-apocalyptic Eastern Europe to New York City.
3 connections found
View:
3 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Babylon A.D. to
A disheveled and incoherent jumble, "Babylon A.D." sadly loses the few bits of intriguing groundwork it lays amidst a cacophony of mangled editing, lethargic performances, and an utterly unfocused and often contradictory narrative.One could easily dismiss it for using a dystopian story that's been done many a time before by films slightly worse ("Ultraviolet") and immensely better ("Children of Men").
While the basic Children of Men-ish thematics (people smuggling, the end of nations, the intersections of religion, biological warfare, and environmental devastation) might have been intriguing in the project’s early stages, such complexities have long since been reduced to PG-13 car chases, shoot-outs, and generally unconvincing special effects.
As it stands, watching it is like trying to take in a late-night double feature of The Fifth Element and Children of Men while nodding off every ten minutes.
Set in the Earth of 2019 - which is very much like the war-plagued, ecologically ravaged place audiences last saw in the far superior Children of Men - Babylon A.D. is the story of Toorop (Diesel), a mercenary hired to smuggle some human cargo from a Mongolian convent to New York.
“Babylon A.D.” also suffers from being a little too similar to other science fiction movies like “Children of Men,” “The Fifth Element” and “Blade Runner,” which are far superior in my book.
Maybe we could accept this premise, if we haven’t seen essentially the exact same plot done better in Alfonso Cuaron’s “Children of Men” and your mind tends to glaze over any of the attempted social commentary undertones by all of the stupid dialogue and action scenes.
"You got a mouse in your pocket?" giggles pretty Bainsely (French actress Mélanie Thierry, of the bizarro 2008 Vin Diesel puzzler Babylon A.D. ), who seems oddly charmed by Qohen's peculiarities.
Director, actor, editor, producer, writer Mathieu Kassovitz was last seen acting in Amelie , but broke internationally with the French ghetto drama La Haine (which means hate).
French filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz might be familiar from his gritty, career-making Parisian ghetto drama "La Haine," or from acting gigs in "Amelie" and "Munich."
Co-writer and director Mathieu Kassovitz has a distinguished CV as a filmmaker (his 1995 drama La Haine was a prescient portrait of class and racial tensions in Paris's most volatile banlieues) and actor (he played the object of Audrey Tautou's affections in Amélie).
That is exactly what French director Mathieu Kassovitz ( La Haine ) had done here.