Merrick here...

There's some indication that Fox will be doing whatever it can to keep a majority of press from seeing Vin Diesel's BABYLON A.D. before it opens Friday. And, to a large extent, this has worked. Feedback about the film has been conspicuously sparse in our inbox, and word of mouth is but a smattering.

None the less, a few outlets have managed to post reviews of (more like warnings about) the film.

Variety offered this assessment...

Looking less like he's trying to save the planet than like he's fighting off a really bad hangover, Vin Diesel punches, shoots but ultimately dozes his way through the sloppy sci-fi actioner "Babylon A.D." A noisier, costlier version of "Children of Men," yet lacking that film's social-political significance and jaw-dropping direction...

...in their review, which you can find HERE.

Sci-Fi Movie Page offers its own dismemberment:

Babylon A.D. is an underwritten mess that never explains the future world it is set in, or any of the issues at stake. The screenplay is in fact so underwritten that it never even bothers with dispatching the main villain (Rampling) and has an underwhelming car chase as the film’s climax while the film’s best action sequence is stuck somewhere in the middle of the movie. The film’s events have no gravitas because the audience simply don’t know exactly why they should care about what is going on.

...says THIS WRITE-UP on their site.


Meanwhile, BABYLON A.D. director Mathieu Kassovitz is busy lobbing nukes...at his own movie!

"I'm very unhappy with the film," he says. "I never had a chance to do one scene the way it was written or the way I wanted it to be. The script wasn't respected. Bad producers, bad partners, it was a terrible experience."

...says THIS ARTICLE at AMC's website, which goes on to call out the studio.

"Fox was sending lawyers who were only looking at all the commas and the dots," he says. "They made everything difficult from A to Z." The last stroke, Kassovitz says, was when Fox interfered with the editing of the film, paring it down to a confusing 93 minutes (original reports were that 70 minutes were cut from the film; Kassovitz says the number is closer to 15).

I didn't think this film looked too rotten when I saw its first trailer (HERE), but now it's hard not to second guess that hope...which was admittedly fleeting to begin with. All of this sounds pretty FUBAR if you ask me.