In a desperate attempt to make Baz Luhrman look white bread and the scion of subtlety and the viscount of vanilla, director Damien Chazelle has concocted a bloody mess of a picture.

BABYLON plays like a bibulous and bilious biopic of the Hollywood era at the tail end of the Silents and the ushering in of the Talkies.

Ironically, much of the dialogue is inaudible, and the sound muddy. Of course, that may be the fault of the State theatre, but there does seem to be a lot of mumbling going on, inarticulate accented English, or shouting and screaming in the case of Margot Robbie.

The picture starts with a massive bowel evacuation by an elephant, pachyderm poo sprayed all over a poor bloke and the camera lens.

Then we go to Fatty Arbuckle taking a golden shower. And Robbie doing a projectile vomit more appropriate for an Exorcist film.

It’s all show and very little substance. BABYLON is a cynical shit show, sordid, morbid and sad, with an excessive running time of three hours. Yawn.

Brad Pitt is a saving grace as a superstar of the silent era finding it hard to adjust to the advent of sound.

Jean Smart, as a Hollywood gossip columnist, who has her best scene towards the end of this tardy Tinseltown wreck, is rock solid and somewhat under utilised in the scenario.

Li Jun Li as Lady Fay Zhu is a study in poise and pragmatism in an unscrupulous business and Olivia Hamilton as a silent film movie director impresses.

In the time it takes for procedure and recovery from a colonoscopy, I’ll take the  three hours for the bowel probe over this excessive exercise. Big bladder testing in its running time, BABYLON is cinema onomatopoeia as it becomes its own subject, seduced by what it’s depicting, a Faustian bargain of a film which loses its own soul in the end. Its heavyweight aspirations are undone by a welter of padded scenes that are not only excessive but extraneous.