Ah, candidness is so refreshing. “Babylon A.D.” opens up this weekend and despite a score composed by the RZA and Hans Zimmer, it looks otherwise pretty worthless to anyone with half a brain.
Hell, even the director of the film, Frenchman Mathieu Kassovitz, thinks so (you’ll remember his as the lovable inept bomb maker from Spielberg’s “Munich”), but he’s not taking much of the blame.
“I’m very unhappy with the film. I never had a chance to do one scene the way it was written or the way I wanted it to be. The script wasn’t respected. Bad producers, bad partners, it was a terrible experience,” he told AMC (via Cinemablend).
He calls the film “pure violence and stupidity,” and he wanted to make something that was substantive, but instead he says its shit. “The movie is supposed to teach us that the education of our children will mean the future of our planet. All the action scenes had a goal: They were supposed to be driven by either a metaphysical point of view or experience for the characters… instead parts of the movie are like a bad episode of 24.”
Apparently the film was riddled with problems from the get-go, it’s not being screened for critics, and apparently 20th Century Fox legal people were a constant drag. “Fox was sending lawyers who were only looking at all the commas and the dots,” he said.
Should the blame fall on Kassovitz? Well, Fox apparently neutered the film to a confusing 93 minutes and in his corner is “La Haine,” the amazing 1995 film about disenfranchised French youth (it’s a new classic even Criterion lovingly put out).
Apparently the truncated cut even confused Diesel. “Am I even in the movie any more, or am I on the cutting room floor?,” he apparently joked. Fox evidently wasn’t available for comment. The final word then is the director’s.
“Fox was just trying to get a PG-13 movie. I’m ready to go to war against them, but I can’t because they don’t give a shit.” But wait, what does this mean for the further Chronicles of Riddick? Oh right, no one with an ounce of taste gives a rat’s ass.
