Snooze-a-thon A.D.

This is a movie that makes the audience long for the cinematic brilliance of “Disaster Movie.” I saw this movie on WEEKEND’s dime, and I still want a refund.

Don’t get confused, there was nothing technically wrong with this flick. The special effects were good, the cameras kept the actors in the middle of the frame and the dialogue was delivered in a passing imitation of English, so in that regard, it was good.

But there was a slight issue with the plot: There wasn’t one. Vin Diesel’s character (his name is Toorop, but that doesn’t matter. He never stops being Vin Diesel) has to smuggle a girl and her bodyguard from Russia to New York. He’s a rough and tough mercenary who doesn’t want to get emotionally attached, and then surprise, he does. Just like we’ve seen a thousand times before.

Beyond this simple premise, there isn’t anything going on. There are hints that this girl Aurora (Mélanie Thierry) is somehow special, but why she’s special and why she is important are never developed whatsoever until the very end of the movie when the writers give an explanation that’s weaker than Diesel’s acting.

The girl is supposedly a virgin and about to give birth to genetically implanted twins, which are supposed to be messiahs for some religion. What religion? They never say. What happened to the world to make it so post-apocalyptic? They never say.

By the time the movie introduces any hard facts about what is going on, the audience is long past caring. For the first hour and a half, it seems like things happen merely because the formula for this type of movie dictates they happen. “Oh, we’re an hour into the movie. Vin should start caring about the girl now. Oh, we’re an hour and a half into it now. Send in the bad guys.”

On paper, the premise for this movie sounds kind of cool. But given how angry the director Mathieu Kassovitz is about the hack re-editing job Fox did to his film, it’s fairly clear they decided to remove all that “scary” exposition in lieu of more explosions and bad one-liners.

Everything about this movie is cliche. It is boring, hackneyed, slow paced and lacks any setup or sense of setting to bring the audience into the story and make them care about the characters. Instead of ponying up $9 at the theater, stay home and watch “The Fifth Element” and “Blade Runner” at the same time, with the sound turned off. Even that way, they’ll make more sense than “Babylon A.D.”