riddickWith his intergalactic fugitive Riddick currently in mothballs (which is too bad – I still think Chronicles of is a blast), Vin Diesel must’ve gone looking for another sci-fi antihero and found it in Babylon A.D. (the rumor made the rounds earlier in the week but just now hit the trades, the online equivalent of chiseling it in stone).

Based on the cult French novel Babylon Babies, the “extrapolationist” story takes place in a dystopian future of cyborgs and Serbian mobsters. Diesel will play a lone-wolf war veteran who gets hired to escort a schizophrenic woman (who also happens to be pregnant with a "genetically modified messiah") from Russia to Canada, only to discover there’s a lot more to her than he initially thought (as in: the end of the world). So I guess it’s sort of like a more existential version of Cyborg 2.

An alliance of Fox and Studio Canal, the movie will be helmed by Mathieu Kassovitz, who’s probably best known as Amelie’s quirky love interest or Munichs jittery bomb-maker, though he’s also proven his worth behind the camera on the French thrillers La Haine and The Crimson Rivers. And… Gothika.

Diesel will next be seen with a rather distracting head of hair in the courtroom comedy-drama Find Me Guilty before he takes the Mach 3 to his skull again and grabs the garrote for an adaptation of the videogame series Hitman (which, according to my source, has a script that "kicks ass"). Hey, whatever keeps him away from Pacifier 2.