SCI-FI ACTION; 1hr 30min
STARRING: Vin Diesel, Michelle Yeoh, Mélanie Thierry
Deliverance: from left, Yeoh, Thierry and Diesel
“You need two things to live in this business — your balls and your word.” So sayeth Vin Diesel as mercenary Toorop, a hard man in a ravaged future. Toorop is too ballsy for his own good and he apparently has little to lose, hence his acceptance of a tricky assignment (from a revelling-in-it sleazy Gérard Depardieu). Toorop agrees to transport a young girl (Thierry as Aurora) and her protective shadow (Yeoh as Sister Rebeka) from a Kazakhstan convent to New York. What he can’t know is that Aurora is a world of trouble. At any rate, he has enough problems dealing with the brutal soup of humanity in director Mathieu Kassovitz’s pandemonic vision of Maurice G. Dantec’s 1999 novel Babylon Babies.
Kassovitz is a man with big-picture vision. His staging packs a streamlined visual wallop, and the express action does exactly what it should. And so, for that matter, does Le Diesel: scarred, tattooed and buff buff buff, he works his gravelly pipes, muscles out the rocketing insanity, and keeps a dead-straight face while he is at it.
