Six Thousand Miles to Nowhere

When you envision Vin Diesel (okay, so you probably don’t do this very often, if at all, but just go with me on this) you likely think of the actor as he is now: bald, gruff, maybe a little thicker around the middle, but preaching on and on about family. It’s the character he’s basically made into his own personal largely thanks to the The Fast and the FuriousStarted as a film about undercover policing in the illegal street-racing community, this series has grown to encompass a number of different genres and become one of the most bankable franchises in the world. franchise, the movie series that, despite him sitting out for the second and third movies of that franchise, has come to define his whole career. He’s had several other franchises over the years, like the xXx films, the Riddick series, and the Guardians of the Galaxy films, very few have managed to eclipse his work with Fast and Furious.

When you go back far enough, though, you do find an actor still searching for who he is supposed to be. He generally played a gruff, dark, sometimes menacing figure, but his natural charisma tended to bleed through. His characters felt largely interchangeable in many movies, such as in Knockaround Guys and The Pacifier, but there were glimmers of an actor that could do more. He gives an all time great performance in Find Me Guilty, and he has a different level of gruffness in Boiler Room, and you can easily think, “yeah, this is a guy that’s gonna go far in his dramatic career.”

But then you hit a film like Babylon A.D. which, despite a game cast, a stupidly big budget for what we see on screen, and obvious sequel ambitious, is absolutely devoid of anything worthwhile, and that includes a decent performance from Diesel. The actor is in pure franchise mode, playing a character that feels equal parts Dominick Torretto and Richard B. Riddick, and though I’d never accuse the actor of phoning in a part, he’s clearly in paycheck mode here. This film needs something, anything to make it interesting, but there’s absolutely nothing in this film to recommend it unless you’re one of the few curious enough to dig into the actor’s biggest bombs.

Diesel stars as the terribly named Hugo Toorop, a retired smuggler who now lives in Eastern Europe, having been blacklisted from ever returning to the U.S. Happy enough in his life, but effectively living in squalor, Toorop (which is what everyone calls him in the film even though Huge is much easier to say) reluctantly agrees to take a job from Gorsky (Gérard Depardieu), a Russian gangster Toorop once worked for. The job is simple enough, he assumes: take a girl from a convent in Mongolia and transport her to New York. Easy, except not so much.

Despite the girl, Aurora (Mélanie Thierry), having a protector, Sister Rebeka (Michelle Yeoh), the travel to New York isn’t easy. The first problem is that there is a gang of parkour b-boys (no, really) that want to capture Aurora and take them from Toorop. They chase after the smuggler and his crew repeatedly, often causing problems. But there are plenty of events that also cause issues, from a struggle to gain passage aboard an old Russian sub, to drone attacks at the Canadian border. And the girl seems to have a way about her, a magical way to know things and predict how events will turn out. Everyone wants this girl and no one will say why, which leaves Toorop distrustful. It’s going to take all his skill to keep Aurora safe… that is if that’s even the right thing to do.

Based on the book Babylon Babies, Babylon A.D. is a threadbare story that barely knows what it’s doing most of the time. The film is set in a post-apocalypse that barely feels like the world saw an apocalypse at all. We don’t know what caused the previous balance of power in the world to end, what the state of the various nations are, or what was lost (or gained) when everything went tits up. Hell, we learn so little about the world I wasn’t even sure for most of it that some kind of apocalypse even happened. It’s dystopian, but generically so to the point that you never really get a sense of the world at all.

This is the first problem for the film since not understanding the world also means we don’t understand why Aurora needs to be moved at all. She’s living in a convent in Mongolia when we meet her, and she seems perfectly happy there. People want her, but it’s not made clear until the film is nearly over why that is (it’s a “twist”) and she’s so passive in the story right up until just before the end that whether she stayed in Mongolia or not it doesn’t seem like it would have affected her. The film, in effect, lacks stakes when it comes to Aurora, and that’s in large part because the world itself lacks definition to tell us what those stakes might be.

So much of the film is generic, though. Vin Diesel’s character, for example, has no real definition to him. He’s a retired smuggler, but we learn little about his past, why he lives in Eastern Europe now (and not anywhere else outside of the U.S.), or who he is as a person. The only shading he gets comes from Vin Diesel’s performance, and while Diesel can lend Toorop his standard gruff charisma, there’s little to hang it on in this film. And the same goes for Yeoh as well, who is absolutely wasted here. She gives a solid performance as Aurora’s guardian, but there’s no real story to her. She exists to act like a mother figure to Aurora and that’s it.

Worse for both of them is the fact that even their action scenes suck. You have Diesel, who isn’t the best fighter but is at least competent as an action star (most of his films are action movies), and Yeoh, who is one of the best action stars around (male or female), and they get placed in scenes where you can’t really see anything they’re doing. The scenes are filmed too close, with shaky camera work and constant over-editing. And it’s not just Diesel’s shots that are like this as the film is consistent in filming all its action, no matter who is performing, in this way. It does the unthinkable and makes Michelle Yeoh hard to watch, and that really should never be possible.

Bear in mind this is a sci-fi action film and it fails on the action front entirely. Well, okay, it fails on the sci-fi front, too. It doesn’t do any world building, as I noted, but it also doesn’t define its technology, what the tech is for, how anything works, or even what any of the characters are seeking to do in this futuristic work. It’s painfully generic about its future setting, cribbing from films like Blade Runner when it isn’t shrugging its shoulders and filming in real, blasted out cities in Eastern Europe. Nothing makes sense or connects in any real way, even when it starts randomly throwing out high-minded sci-fi concepts from nowhere in its last act.

And that last act really is bad. While the Aurora character isn’t well defined for most of the film (because the movie is hiding who she really is and what her true plot is for a twist reveal late in the game), eventually the film decides to dump every sci-fi trope it can on her. In quick succession (and spoilers for a 17 year old movie) we find out that Aurora is a pre-cog, except no she actually just knows everything, oh but actually she’s like the Virgin Mary because she’s carrying two babies via immaculate conception, except no, that’s not true either, she’s actually an engineered supercomputer in human form designed to reproduce and have more children so they can spread across the world. Like… what? Bearing in mind that none of this is supported by the first two acts of the film, none of this even fits together well when it’s all revealed. It comes across as lazy writing to justify a film that didn’t really know what it was doing.

I haven’t read Babylon Babies so I don’t know if this was the plot of that book as it is with the film. I’d be willing to give the benefit of the doubt that something was lost in the translation and that this poorly made, largely vapid, completely empty film failed to bring over the storytelling and nuance of the book in any way. It’s that or the book was also trash and the studio should have known better than to adapt it which… okay, yes, that might also be true.

Still, what we have is an absolute failure of a movie that squanders everyone’s time, both in front of the camera and watching it after the fact. Made on a budget of $70 Mil (and you have to assume most of that went into the cocaine budget for the movie because it’s absolutely not visible on screen) the film looks bad, feels bad, and is just bad in general. It failed at the Box office, only just squeaking past its production budget to bring in $72.1 Mil, and you have to think most of that was because Diesel was a rising star and people wanted more of the actor. And then they immediately forgot about this film, leaving it to the dustbin of time.

Which is where it deserves to live. Babylon A.D. is terrible, and I actually feel kind of bad saying its name out loud again. We were all happier forgetting it existed, but like saying the name Candyman three times in the mirror, I spoke this film back into existence. I am so sorry.