BABYLON A.D. [PG-13]

Sci-fi epics like Babylon A.D. are a lot like Frankenstein’s monster. They are large and clumsy, and stitched together from the parts of many others. And with an action hero like Vin Diesel in the lead, the best it can muster when it speaks is echoes of Peter Boyle’s cry, “Super duper!” from Mel Brooks’s “Young Frankenstein.”

Puttin’ on the glitz here is French writer-director and former arthouse darling Mathieu Kassovitz (”Hate”). He has the story of a mysterious young nun named Aurora (Mélanie Thierry) and Toorop (Diesel), the muscle hired to shuttle them from Russia to New York, with which to work, and a number of thoughtful touches suggest that some far more thoughtful was intended. Instead, this vague, heavily dystopian future tale appears to have been heavily edited by studio Fox for length and to earn a more marketable PG-13 rating, and it neuters the film right out of the gate.

Casting Diesel was a mistake. He is more at home in the “Riddick” universe, in which his brawn is needed to stress how sometimes might does make right; here, a more cerebral and reflective personality is required to give a smart face to what was obviously a script that meant something to someone (wiry fellow countryman Vincent Cassel was Kassovitz’s original choice). Chinese superstar Michelle Yeoh, as Rebeka, the sister charged with saving the mysterious Aurora from spiritual corruption, may as well be a robot nanny, her character develops so little. Diesel’s arc is unbelievable; one minute he’s the “I need no one” mercenary, and the next he’s smiling and laughing after super-being Aurora saves his life. Thierry is little more than impossibly pretty, and the presence of heavy hitters like Gerard Depardieu as a crime boss and Charlotte Rampling as the head of a sect that wants to use the technology that made Aurora to build its legacy suggest that the project was intended more than tax-deductible eye candy.

Maurice Dantec, the Gallic counterpart to our cyberpunk guru William Gibson, wrote the book “Babylon Babies” on which the film is based. Unmolested, Kassovitz may have been able to turn it into a modern-day chestnut like “Planet Of The Apes” (also based on a novel by a French author). Instead, the awkwardly stitched superficial remnants of “Blade Runner,” “The Fifth Element” and every modern-day P.K. Dick adaptation fester, causing us to lament what might have been as we gaze upon their very separate parts on the slab.•••

Robert Newton is the editor of Worcester Movies.