The Return of Vin Diesel?

Vin Diesel's been making quite the splash over the past few days. Everybody ignores the guy for a few years, his new movie Babylon A.D. is probably going to bomb this weekend, but suddenly he's all over the blogs. What for?

-The trailer for Fast and Furious just came out. Yup, it's the fourth movie in the series, but like the second, it leaves out the definite articles. Miraculously they managed to re-team all four headliners from the original: Diesel, Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez, and Jordana Brewster. Wow...imagine how unexciting that lineup would be if it wasn't a Fast and the Furious movie.

-On the Babylon A.D. press tour, Diesel told MTV that two more Riddick movies are on the way. Wait...really?

“David Twowy right now is writing the scripts. The only question is whether we take a page from the ‘Lord of the Rings’ guys and try to shoot the two chapters at the same time. There are two more in mind,” he said of Riddick, the Furyan warrior first introduced in the 2000 film “Pitch Black.” “‘The Chronicles of Riddick’ was presented as a three part trilogy that would answer ‘Pitch Black’ in the same way that ‘Lord of the Rings’ answered ‘The Hobbit.’”

You talk a big game, Diesel, but we also remember you telling us you were going to star in a movie about the ancient military commander Hannibal back when the first Fast and the Furious came out. Still waiting.

-Oh, and about Babylon A.D....the plot actually sounds kind of cool, so it makes perfect sense that the ads aren't explaining it whatsoever. Diesel plays a mercenary in the near future who has to escort a woman from Russia to America who's carrying what could become a genetically modified Messiah. (Okay, it sounds cool to me.) But, whoops, the director of the film just trashed it:

"The movie is supposed to teach us that the education of our children will mean the future of our planet. All the action scenes had a goal: They were supposed to be driven by either a metaphysical point of view or experience for the characters... instead parts of the movie are like a bad episode of 24."

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).

"Babylon will probably have a good first weekend, but the second weekend we're going to lose 30%," says Kassovitz. "I don't see how people who went through all these amazing blockbusters like The Dark Knight and Iron Man this summer will take it."

You think it's only going to drop 30% in its second weekend? Dude, most summer movies drop by 50%. Unfortunate to hear Fox screwed with the film though, because they clearly have no clue what they're doing: their summer line-up this year consisted of Meet Dave, X-Files 2, and The Rocker.

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