Babel, why are you so hard to rate? There are moments of brilliance in which strong acting and scriptwriting kept me on the edge of my seat. But it's inter-cut with heavy-handed dramatic nonsense and put together like a bad patchwork scarecrow.

With just the Moroccan and Mexican storylines, this could have been called "White Family Has a Bad Day." And that might actually have been a pretty good movie (with some serious massaging of the Mexican script and better editing to merge the two stories.)

Beyond the movie's theme of language, The Japanese story had next to nothing to do with the other two, and the tenuous bond felt silly and forced. Despite that, it was likely the strongest of the three tales and would have easily stood up on its own as a separate movie.

It's like a connect-the-dots puzzle in which a couple neat drawings are started, but some of the dots are missing or mis-numbered and you can never finish the scene.