HAPPENING [L'ÉVÉNEMENT]
(2022 dir. Audrey Diwan) Date Seen: May 15 2022
332) BABYLON A.D.
(2008 dir. Mathieu Kassovitz) Date Seen: May 15 2022
Outside of having one of the coolest opening shots in film history (think the opening of THE ‘BURBS if it morphed into a tracking bullet shot from THE MATRIX), I found Mathieu Kassovitz’s final big Hollywood $ release to be kind of a mess. The problem with this adaptation of Bébés de Babylone is the screenplay's dumb action movie tropes constantly undermine the book’s sentiments. There’s hints of portentousness always going on in the background (a dire refugee crisis of CHILDREN OF MEN proportions, etc.) but the tension never builds much due to the way Vin Diesel’s character "Toorop" is underwritten as a perpetually unfazed badass. A reluctant hero archetype is one thing, but this dude was like a Neanderthal Steven Seagal. And on the flip side of that, there’s also many leaden scenes that could’ve used some brevity. As was the case with his other U.S. studio outing GOTHIKA, Kassovitz throws in many VFX-enhanced impossible camera shots, but they really only ever amount to fancy window dressing. It's hard to care about little things like this when the movie's tonal & pacing issues never go away & are constantly weighing everything down. Moments in Toorop’s (Diesel) quest that should’ve been earnest just fall flat because there hasn’t been enough dramatic build-up to truly care about anything.
(also LOL wasn’t there a hair band named BABYLON A.D. in the 80s?)
(also LOL wasn’t there a hair band named BABYLON A.D. in the 80s?)
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