David J. Williams

With Babylon A.D., Vin Diesel’s career careens precariously toward what we call the Rutger Hauer Event Horizon: that point of no return beyond which a star only makes straight-to-DVD guilty pleasures. There’s a lucrative career there, to be sure, and hey, it beats auditions while you hold down the day job. But Diesel has fallen a long way since his Pitch Black glory days, and that’s a real shame.

Particularly because Babylon could have amounted to a damn sight more than it did. Someone clearly sank some money into the thing, and the world it depicts has a cool dystopian feel to it (there’s some truly gorgeous scenery at times). It opens well, too: in a hellhole that looks it might be round twelve of some Chechnyan war.  And they probably should have kept the whole thing there, rather than turning the movie into the Children of Men-meets-Cyborg roadtrip that it rapidly becomes.  By the time the narrative reaches America, the plot has descended into near-total incoherence, and by the time the movie ends, the audience’s reaction was one of near-total derision.  (They were vocal about it too.)

Leaving us to wrestle with the question of Just Went Wrong.  The script feels like it was done by a committee, so that’s one thing.  And the movie ran over-budget, which seems to have gotten the studio involved perhaps earlier than it should have.  Director Mathieu Kassowitz has claimed that the studio bosses cut 20 minutes of his vision, and maybe that was the problem, but I didn’t see anything on the screen to convince me that there were uncut gems lying around in the vault.  I’m also not inclined to give the guy who unleashed Gothika upon us the benefit of the doubt.

And I have to wonder why Vin Diesel’s agent did.

The blogosphere (or, rather, specialized segments of it) is abuzz with Vin Diesel’s statements about not one, but two forthcoming Riddick movies. Apparently director David Twohy is even now writing the scripts, which he and Diesel are about to start shopping around. Intriguingly, they’re also conferring on whether they’ll end up shooting both movies separately, or together, a la Lord of the Rings. And the LOTR reference is instructive, as it underscores what I was saying last month about just how ambitious the original Riddick plans were. And apparently still are. Just one problem.

Money.

Folks, nothing’s been signed. Twohy can write all he wants and Diesel can talk to whomever he damn well pleases and fans can work themselves up into a Furyan frenzy, but the fact of the matter remains that Chronicles underperformed at the box office. Which is going to make any sequels a VERY tough sell.  I’m not saying it can’t be done. But ultimately the pitch meetings that Twohy/Diesel have with Hollywood execs may not be about Riddick anyway.

They’ll be about Babylon A.D.

Which opens in the States this weekend, and is Diesel’s first SF movie since Riddick. Making it a great way for Hollywood to tell if Diesel still has box-office draw as a SF star. Which, bluntly put, means that if Babylon tanks, you can forget about seeing anything involving Riddick, ever again. And it doesn’t look like we’re off to a good start, either: the movie opened in France, and has been panned by critics so far. Sure, Babylon might just suck in its own right. Doesn’t matter to Hollywood. Hey, it’s their money. When I invest mine, I like to see proof that it’s going to get me a return too.

So I leave you with this: if you really really REALLY want to see more Riddick movies, and you DON’T go see Babylon A.D. THIS WEEKEND, then your commitment to the cause has been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Convert now or fall forever.