Babylon A.D.

Five years after subjecting us to the horror of Halle Berry in Gothika, sometime actor Mathieu Kassovitz (Munich) takes another crack at directing with equally muddled results. The promise of his debut, La Haine, remains unfulfilled.

Based on a novel by Philip K. Dick wannabe Maurice G. Dantec, it aims to mix the beauty of Blade Runner and Minority Report with the brain of Children of Men and the brawn of The Matrix.

Unfortunately, the combination of sub-apocalyptic futurescapes, heavy-handed religious overtones and another one of Diesel’s humourless anti-heroes is more Pitch Blah than Pitch Black.

In a grim and grey Russia devoid of painters and decorators, oddly named soldier-of-fortune Toorop (Diesel) suddenly has his nice rabbit dinner interrupted by armed goons.

They work for Gorsky (Gerard Depardieu, bearing the least convincing prosthetic nose since Cyrano de Bergerac), a super-smuggler who wants Toorop to escort a young lady from a convent in deepest Mongolia to New York.

Why? Well, depending on whether you hear the story from the mad scientists or the sinister ‘Neolite’ cult who are all itching to get their hands on her, the cherubic Aurora (Mélanie Thierry) is either a genetically modified freak carrying a deadly virus or she’s the new Messiah.

Either way, she is very, very important to the future of mankind. So, being one of those philanthropic hired killers, Toorop grumpily agrees.

Handily, it turns out that there’s more to both Aurora and her chaperone Sister Rebeka (Yeoh) than meets the eye.

Their perilous trek takes them across the icy wastes of Russia and North America by plane, train and submarine. At one point they even manage to out-run two fighter jets on skidoos.

Who’s chasing them and why is rarely made clear, though the action is so stop-start that there is plenty of time to explain. Instead, Kassovitz pads out the stuttering plot with unintentionally hilarious bonding scenes.

Big sci-fi needs big bucks. Sadly, Babylon A.D. is strictly straight-to-DVD: light on action and razzle-dazzle, heavy on half-baked, half-inched ideas.

Take the profiteering Neolites. Led by villainous ‘high priestess’ Charlotte Rampling, their beliefs mirror those of a certain religious organisation favoured by a certain Top Gun star.

But that satirical punch remains unthrown, as do potentially telling jabs at genetic engineering, martial law and the relentless intrusion of product placement in sci-fi movies.

Ultimately, Kassovitz simply gives up, blundering through an incoherent conclusion that leaves more loose ends than a bowl of congealed spaghetti (er, where did Rampling go?).

He does, however, leave the door open for a sequel. But who'd want to clone a runt?

Elliott Noble