Babylon A.D.

In a post-apocalyptic future, a mercenary soldier (Vin Diesel) is hired by a shady warlord (Gérard Depardieu) to escort (i.e., smuggle) an orphan girl (Mélanie Thierry) to New York City, along with her guardian (Michelle Yeoh). He doesn’t know why, and neither do we, except that an ascetic-looking Charlotte Rampling seems to have something to do with it; when the explanation finally comes, it doesn’t exactly reward our patience. The movie leans heavily—indeed, drunkenly—on Diesel’s sullen star presence, but the script by Joseph Simas and director Mathieu Kassovitz (from Maurice G. Dantec’s novel) is an unruly disaster. Kassovitz made headlines by bad-mouthing the movie and blaming the suits at 20th Century Fox, but it’s hard to see what he might have done to save things, even if he’d had the chance.