There's good news for European film fans who are to get one over the U.S. audience for a change. This time it's with Vin Diesel's next film Babylon A.D.

It seems that the European audiences are going to receive a longer cut of the film than the U.S. audiences who are going to receive a significantly shorter version.

The word is that the European cut is going to be the complete cut, and the word is that it's currently running at two hours and forty minutes.

The official news is that there will be two versions of the film, one for Europe and one for the U.S. with the U.S. version being significantly shorter. That comes from the MyMarketingSpace site for the film.

Allocine through Twitch and Jo Blo, have the news that this is going to be significant, and give us that huge, almost three hour figure. Now that's one hell of a film.

Mathieu Kassovitz is directing this film about a mercenary who is escorting a woman from Russia to China. He isn't aware that the woman is carrying an organism that a cult want to harvest in order to create a genetically modified messiah.

Now to me that sounds like an excellent story line. It's based on the story by Maurice G. Dantec called Babylon Babies (Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com) and also stars Michelle Yeoh, Gérard Depardieu, Mark Strong, Charlotte Rampling and Lambert Wilson.

A strong and diverse cast, a great story, and a powerful director who brought us such films as the excellent Les Rivières pourpres (The Crimson Rivers) and Gothika. I have to admit I really am looking forward to this film, and despite what a lot of you might think of Vin Diesel, I think the guy carries a huge on screen attraction, and he can act, it just needs him to be pushed more than he usually is.

The news that there's going to be a couple of cuts of the film is interesting, and if they really are leaving the European one at that length then that's the version I want to see and none other. Lucky I'm in Europe then. What do Americans think about this news though?