Movie name: Babylon A.D

Directed by: Mathieu Kassovitz

Cast: Vin Diesel, Michelle Yeoh

Showing at: City Pride Satara Road, Fame Akurdi, Mangala

In Babylon AD Vin Diesel, the slowest-moving action hero in movies, travels over land and under water from somewhere in the former Soviet Union to New York City in the company of a nun (Michelle Yeoh) and a young woman named Aurora (Mélanie Thierry). Aurora is either some kind of biological weapon or some kind of messianic figure. Our judgments, in any case, may be superfluous, since the director, Mathieu Kassovitz, has already publicly described it as "pure violence and stupidity".

He did not mean that in a good way, and while I hate to contradict an artist's assessment of his own work—Kassovitz blames 20th Century Fox for compromising his political and metaphysical vision—a purely violent and stupid film might have been kind of fun. This one, while it has some nice futuristic design touches (including grubby East Bloc housing projects and a splendidly renovated Harlem brownstone), combines badly executed action sequences with mystic mumbo-jumbo that I suspect not even a two-disc Director's Cut DVD could make comprehensible.