Somewhere inside Babylon AD, is a great film hoping to get out...

It's got a bad press. The director - Matthieu Kassovitz, who did 'The Crimson Rivers' - has disowned it, following massive interference from the studio. And its almost sunk without trace. Almost.

Because hidden inside Babylon AD - a cookiecutter, by the numbers sci fi action flick - are moments of greatness, despite the best efforts to turn it into an anodyne, bland, shoot 'em up. Rumours have abounded that some 60 minutes of this film has been chopped out in order to make it more commercial, less difficult, less cerebral - like Starship Troopers, they sucked its brains out.

Imagine if you had only ever seen the 'Happy' studio version of Brazil, the one where he flies off into the sunset and everyone lives happily ever after. Imagine if you'd watched Kingdom of Heaven and thought, well, that was a bit bland. With both of those, you can tell there's something more going on beneath the surface thats been edited out to placate the MTV watching chavs who thought " 4 Fast 4 Furious" was the Citizen Kane of action movies. Then imagine if you watched both of those films in their directors cut, and suddenly realised how shallow, how empty, how vacous the other versions were.

Vin Diesel plays a mercenary called Tourep - hiding away in the Eastern Europe, whose old boss comes out of the woodwork with a final job offer to allow him to get out of there good and proper. He has to deliver a girl called Aurora from a convent in Russia to New York, but there's things afoot that are not so easily explained. Her ability to read peoples mind, know things she's never been told, the endless relentless pursuit from all sides. For it turns out that the girl in question is apparently the messiah the world has been waiting for, a miracle.... yes, it all makes a little more sense in the context of the film, but just how muddled it is seems to be driven with the ability to shave off subtext and subtlety, and replace it instead with a barely coherent plot that has vast portions of it excised for no reason except to make sure that Johnny Redneck from the MTV focus group doesn't get confused, and buys more popcorn...More Snickers... and More Coke...Coke Zero that is, judging by the crass product placement.

Still, despite their best efforts, there's fragments of genius here. The subtle attention of detail, like self locating maps, the Russian bullet train to Canada passing through a scarred and destroyed post-atomic landscape, the overt commercialisation of airlines and skyscrapers, all hint at a far more interesting, far more subtle film with depth and subtlety all edited out into incoherency. There's so many unanswered questions from the film, so many plot holes, you could drive a Russian Nuclear submarine through it. But on the other hand, you're only a few minutes away from a car chase, an exploding city square, a snowbike chase, a massive and astounding shootout in a city street.... all these things that the film is in such a rush to get to now its been edited to about half its previous length, that the actual coherency and reasons are now sadly and unmercifully absent. Just to mention one example, why is it that they get pursued by cars and then suddenly turn from the middle of a forest to a chase on a railway track? Why? its so sloppily edited, its unforgiveable. And as for that tacked on happy ending, please. If I wanted my intelligence insulting, I could do far far easier and cheaper than this.

The shame is, that there's a great film hidden somewhere inside here, edited out in a relentless quest for profit. Instead the studio have butchered what could have been a brilliant, magnificent, multilayered dystopian science fiction classic and turned into another dumb, multiplex shoot 'em up.

Visually sumptious, exciting and brilliantly made - but hacked to pieces and incoherency but an uncaring studio, Babylon AD is a film of great potential. I look forward to seeing that potential . But not today, not here, not at the cinema's now. That film you see now is just an action teaser trailer for a greater epic, and mores the pity.

Babylon AD - wait for the directors cut. It'll shame this version into insignificance. But as it stands, its a bastardised, unfulfilling sci fi actioneer of little distinction. But great talent and potential squandered by a thoughtless studio. Of course, since it tanked, we may well be waiting a long while for that directors cut….and more the shame. It’s a film that deserves to be seen, that deserves a far better fate than this.

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