Salocin

A Man Apart

Vin Diesel continues to drive up his value as an action star, despite the shoddy scripts he chooses (or is given) to work with. This cluttered movie with an overwrought twist brings many excuses for the release of plenty of energy in the form of violence and car chases, but with an added sense of story that was lacking from other recent Vin-films.

"A Man Apart" is nevertheless only a step in the right direction, characters that seem developed are given too little screen-time for us to appreciate their motivations and constraints, and the film ends up with a sense of shallowness that could have been avoided with a little further crafting. This by-the-numbers drug and cops movie should have been straight-to-video, were it not for Vin Diesel's gravelly charisma.

Seeing the reaction of the world around me to the movie when it came out in the theatres (don't admit you went to see it, pretend it doesn't exist), I decided to wait until this was released for rental before I gave it 2 hours of my time.

And for 2 hours I was suitably distracted, but unfortunately, not truly entertained. The movie is sabotaged by two unhelpful characteristics.

First of all, the characters seem two-dimensional, largely because we see them so little. Upon further examination, one almost believes that the characters are actually quite well developed, but the scenes in which this development was supposed to be revealed ended up on the cutting floor. This may be the unfortunate consequence of an action movie that knows it will have trouble holding the audience's attention - it gets shortened, at some considerable cost.

The second difficulty I have with this film is that it has too many dead ends. We see too many things that are not brought back into the mainstream of the movie's storyline, and that therefore set up potential actions and consequences that are not explored, and give the sense that much of the time spent watching the screen was an excuse for some action, rather than a consistent progression in a story.

Since this movie is not as bad as either "The Fast and the Furious" or "xXx", I have hope that Vin Diesel (or his agent) is getting smart, and that better scripts are being requested as he demonstrates that his voice, physique and presence can command at least a certain sub-group of the filmgoing public's attention, despite lacklustre material to work with. Perhaps this will inspire some producers to get better films developed, or perhaps they will continue to play it safe. Only more challenging roles (such as Riddick in "Pitch Black") will enable Vin Diesel to reach higher than cookie-cutter monosyllabic action roles.