Quartile rating: 5.5/10 · 1 rating
A veteran-turned-mercenary is hired to take a young woman with a secret from post-apocalyptic Eastern Europe to New York City.
Babylon A.D. is a notoriously troubled production that shows its seams throughout. The plot is convoluted yet shallow, failing to develop its interesting dystopian premise in any meaningful way — largely due to studio interference that gutted the film's runtime and coherence. Acting is serviceable at best; Vin Diesel is stoic to a fault, and even Michelle Yeoh and Gérard Depardieu are wasted in underdeveloped roles. The cinematography has some competent gritty future-world visuals with decent location shooting across Eastern Europe, elevating it slightly above the rest. Novelty is low — despite its cyberpunk and religious-cult trappings, the film feels like a derivative blend of Children of Men, The Fifth Element, and generic action fare without meaningfully synthesizing them. The ending is the film's most notorious failure: rushed, incoherent, and clearly the result of butchered editing, it leaves threads dangling and satisfies no one — a genuinely poor conclusion even by blockbuster standards.