DOWN (Dining Out With Nerds) report: Babylon A.D.

So you say, “How bad can a Vin Diesel movie be? Other than The Pacifier, of course?” One expects some simple things from a Vin Diesel movie. Lots of action, hand-to-hand combat, guns firing, cars blowed up real good. Vin Diesel gets beaten up — probably some innocent little girl or a flock of baby ducks gets clobbered too — just so you know the bad guys are really nasty heartless cruel bad guys. And then, against overwhelming odds, Vin beats the crap out of them. Sometimes you can’t tell who’s the bad guys and who’s the good guys, or one pretends to be the other, but old Vinnie figures it out in the end, and a good time is had by all. You won’t get musical numbers, you won’t have to think a lot, there won’t be any serious relationship stuff. It’s like a train wreck: how can you screw it up?

And yet BAD manages to screw it up. Vin has to ferry a woman with special powers from Russia to America (special powers besides her exotic hottiness). But others are watching and trying to kidnap her for their own purposes. Or perhaps kill her for their own purposes. Someone almost blows them up, yet both sides actually want her alive. After he removes her from the hidden convent, someone blows up the convent and kills all her friends. Why? She’s not there any more and they know it. They’re already chasing her! Just to prove how bad they are?

Then one set of good/bad guys turns out to be run by her father (well, the guy who grew her in a test tube and installed an AI in her). He wants to keep her out of the hands of the religious fruitcakes who originally contracted with him for her construction. They have somehow gotten her pregnant via hypodermic injection, so now she’s their shining immaculate conception. I think they’re not trying to kill her. She has super powers. From an artificial intelligence? I’d like to know how even a really, really, super-Mensa supercomputer protects her from the missile that explodes a foot in front of her face. Never explained. (The father does say, “The kids are very good at survival.” Uh huh.) But giving birth to the twins does kill her. Never explained. And the twins have inherited the AI. Never explained.

Some movies invite us to decipher the plot line. Memento was a brain-teaser. The Usual Suspects. But no one goes to a Vin Diesel movie to try to figure out the plot!

If you ignore the gaping plot holes... plot pits... plot canyons, the rest of BAD is a reasonable Vin Diesel movie. It does have some good fights, gritty and dark environments, things blowed up real good, and some of the scenery (and I mean the outdoors) is very pretty. Decide for yourself, but our group was unanimous that this movie sucked.