Well, now... I wrote this column last week before leaving for vacation, back when there was still some hope that Babylon A.D. would turn out to be a halfway decent slice of sci-fi cinema. Looking at the early reviews, apparently this is not the case -- even director Mathieu Kassovitz has gone on record saying the film is a piece of crap. It seems that once again the talented French filmmaker has been disrespected and pushed around by an American production company (if you believe his version of the story), and although I honestly believe he's got a lot more great movies in him, at this point I highly doubt they'll be made here in the U.S. It's our loss.

The flashy sci-fi pic Babylon A.D. may end up being little more than Children of Men for the Transformers set, but I’m holding out hope that the film is more ambitious than its underwhelming trailers have made it out to be.
That isn’t because I’ve been clamoring for Vin Diesel’s return to the big screen – though I did sort of enjoy his wisecracking mobster act in the surprisingly good Find Me Guilty – but rather because the film gives director Mathieu Kassovitz a chance to redeem himself after fumbling the ball somewhat with his Hollywood debut. Kassovitz is a great filmmaker who, like far too many young, talented world cinema whiz kids before him, made a splash in his home country (in his case, France) before departing for our shores only to lose some of his mojo in the American studio system. In 1995, he wowed the world with the gritty, black-and-white French youth gang drama La Haine; seven years later, he sat in the director’s chair for the unsuccessful, critically panned (but, still, not entirely terrible) Halle Berry horror flick Gothika.
Kassovitz hasn’t directed another film since (although he’s had some notable acting roles in projects like Spielberg’s Munich), and while I can think of better ways to re-invigorate a directorial career than by hitching your wagon to Vin Diesel’s star, I have a feeling that he might find some Stateside success yet, even if Babylon doesn’t connect. I say this because Kassovitz has basically already proven that he can make a slam-bang Hollywood movie, even if the film in question wasn’t made in Hollywood at all.
2000’s The Crimson Rivers, Kassovitz’s final film before his U.S. career reboot, is a tense, intriguing, extremely well-directed thriller cut from the same cloth as Se7en and the Hannibal Lector franchise. About as far removed from the insulting stereotypes regarding French cinema – boring, pretentious, plot-less, etc. – as a French film can get, Rivers holds its own against its American counterparts in the often tired serial-killer genre and proves without a doubt that Kassovitz has just as solid a handle on mainstream entertainment as he does on more radical filmmaking.
The film opens with two seemingly unrelated police investigations, one extremely gruesome and the other just slightly out of the ordinary. The former finds brooding veteran detective Pierre Niemans (played by the great Jean Reno) called to a creepily quiet university town high in the French Alps to investigate the ritualistic torture/murder of a college librarian; in a small town not far away, meanwhile, young and impulsive police lieutenant Kerkerian (Vincent Cassel) begins digging into a mundane-looking graveyard vandalism case involving some local skinheads that quickly turns into something far more disturbing. By the time these two very different cops’ paths have crossed – later in the film than you might expect – they’ve both begun to piece together a horrifying, decades-old conspiracy involving a little girl’s death, sinister genetics experiments, and an educational institution that’s gone a few steps too far in the pursuit of excellence.
Getting an awful lot of mileage out of his two highly capable stars and some stunning-looking snowbound locations, Kassovitz keeps the tension high and the scenes cranking along even as Rivers’ plot becomes impenetrably murky toward the end. A shade or two lighter in tone than, say, Se7en, the film nevertheless pulls off some truly skin-crawling setpieces – Kassovitz has a way with revealing dead bodies – and effectively maintains an atmosphere of pervasive, intangible evil throughout. The highly energetic, David Fincher-esque camerawork is a major asset, as are co-star Nadia Fares (who kind of reminds me of a French Rachel Weisz) the surprisingly plentiful chase scenes and an out-of-place but very lively fight sequence between Cassel and a couple of punks.
The film smacks of Hollywood, but not at all in a negative sense – it’s an unabashed crowd-pleaser with superior technical craftsmanship, a plot that doesn’t leave you hanging, and lots of action. I’m not at all surprised that American studio execs saw dollar signs all over it, and figured that Kassovitz could do well for himself here in the U.S. They certainly had the right idea – now all they need to do is throw him a project worthy of his talent.