A Man Apart

4/05/03 - Review

Vin Diesel and Larenz Tate are tough DEA cops that have only one thing on their minds: stopping the drug trafficking.  For over seven years, Sean Vetter (Diesel) has spent much of his time tracking down a big time drug lord from the Baja Cartel, known as Meno Lucera.  With the help of his partner, Demetrius Hicks (Tate), they put the drug lord in jail which they think will stop most of the drugs from entering the United States.

Soon after Meno is imprisoned, a man named Diablo takes control of the drug operation and has plans for the people that caused all of the problems.  He sends his people to kill Vetter and his wife but they only succeed at getting his wife.  Major drug players start turning up dead in Mexico including Meno Lucera’s family. 

Filled with revenge, Sean Vetter seeks out anyone that will help him to bring justice to his wife’s killer while at the same time take down Diablo before he can start up the cartel again.  Vetter’s personal feelings get in the way of his work which costs him his job.  He turns to the only people that can help him: Demetrius and the same drug lord that he put in jail in the first place. 

Unlike Vin Diesel’s other movies, there are no fancy cars or an insane amount of stunts or action sequences.  This movie is all about a man’s love for his wife and the revenge that takes over his life once she is killed.  Much like other movies dealing with the same material, Vin Diesel is forced to take the law into his own hands by working his way up the “food chain” to find his wife’s killer.  Everything else is secondary.

Vin doesn’t have any special effects to bolster his acting but without them he was pretty good.  This is the most serious role that he has ever undertaken which he was able to accomplish at some levels.  His partner, Larenz Tate, also did a good job as his partner and longtime friend of many years.  It if wasn’t for them two, the movie would have had no actors. 

Their drug cartel adversaries seem as if they were only there to serve that purpose.  I think most of them had the same expression on their face for the whole movie.  I could care less about them and but it was refreshing to see them die because I didn’t have to watch them stink up the screen anymore.

I heard that this movie had re-shoots months after principal photography ended.  You could tell that the re-shoots tried to help the movie but it couldn’t.  The scenes didn’t really flow together at certain parts of the movie, especially in the beginning.  The main story about Vin Diesel and his lost wife was the best done of the whole movie.  You could really see the pain that he was going through.  Then, in a crucial scene, Vin breaks down and kills one of the drug cartel’s members barehanded which leads to the death of three DEA agents.  Other than that the rest was kind of same old, same old.  The whole voice over part was just a quick way to show that the movie had plot holes.  So the producers thought by adding Vin Diesel’s voice explaining the background would help fill these holes.  It didn’t.

Nothing too special about this movie and unless you care about Vin Diesel, you might want to see another movie.  I like Vin Diesel movies but he was about the only good thing to come out of this.  Maybe if he had a snowboard it would have been better.  That and a better and more entertaining story might help too.

Grade

What do you think?