The movie, based on the French book Babylon Babies by Maurice Georges Dantec, stars the perennially shaven-headed Vin Diesel as a mercenary in the near future. He's "hired to hired to transport a woman and her guardian from Eastern Europe to New York." Kassovitz extols the book's "amazing" scope, its take on geopolitics and its view on how borders of the future will evolve. But the final product of the film "fails to deliver any of these messages," according to its director, who blames the studio. "Fox interfered with the editing of the film, paring it down to a confusing 93 minutes," because, according to Kassovitz, they were "'just trying to get a PG-13 movie.'" [So they edited out ideas? Wasn't Dark Knight PG-13, intellectually stimulating and 2 1/2 hours long? - Zach]

Even the studio that was reportedly to blame for the film's flaws seems to have little faith in its efforts. According to Dark Horizons, the movie is not being screened for critics. That's rarely a good sign, and an even worse one when a project has little to lose. Shot on a relatively low budget, the film could use the publicity that even terrible reviews would offer. Have you seen the trailer? It's got "straight to DVD" written all over it. Even Diesel looks like he doesn't want to be there. He tells a girl to get into a car with all the urgency and emotion of a tranquilized cabbie.

B.A.D. move, Fox.