Vin Diesel's new action movie, "Babylon A.D.," is pure violence and stupidity.

And you don't have to take my word for it. That's its own director talking.

In fact, "pure violence and stupidity" is a direct quote from an interview filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz gave amctv.com. Along with such other choice observations as that Fox cut the film extensively just to get a PG-13 rating, that it now plays "like a bad episode of '24.'"

The movie plays like a mix of an upscale "The Transporter" and a dumbed-down "Children of Men," with Diesel as an end-of-days mercenary skilled at getting people across borders. His latest charge: Melanie Thierry, a spooky young woman who looks like a baby Uma Thurman. His latest assignment: Get her across the world, and safely into Manhattan.

The only problem is that her billionaire mom, who's paying for this little trip, is not exactly on speaking terms with her dad, who's a kind of mad cyborg scientist. And their little disagreement soon turns into the mother of all custody battles, complete with teams of black-garbed henchmen, international incidents, public spectacles and tactical nuclear weapons.

Kassovitz, who previously made the well-regarded "La Haine" and "The Crimson Rivers" abroad -- and the nearly incomprehensible "Gothika" here -- has a definite visual sense. But the movie is too chaotic to allow you to appreciate it; as soon as we start taking in the wonders of a complicated set, he begins blowing it up. (He's like the difficult gifted child who makes intricate Lego palaces and then smashes them against the wall.)

And after half an hour of this, you may feel like throwing a tantrum yourself.

Diesel, the Michelin Man of action movies, grunts and grumbles and sends people to the hospital, but never to much effect. (There's an interesting Diesel movie here -- but unfortunately it's the trailer to the new "The Fast and the Furious" sequel that plays at the start.) Among the wasted actors are Michelle Yeoh as a karate-chopping nun and Charlotte Rampling as a cultish high priestess. (Or the head of a makeup company -- I was never quite sure.) Gerard Depardieu picks up a check, too, as a Russian mobster with his own tank.

He'll need all the armor-plating he can get to survive this. The movie probably made more sense before the studio started cutting -- it's hard to imagine it made less -- but it's pure chaos now, climaxing in a gun battle fought by a furious, anonymous army of men in business suits. Perhaps they were the investors. When the film finally limped to a close, the other people in the audience I saw it with -- all nine of them -- seemed uncertain of whether to leave.

"Is it over?" someone asked hopefully.

Oh, yeah. Before it even began.