Vin Diesel has been known to defy the laws of gravity, whether he’s playing a daredevil street racer, an extreme sports superspy, or a badass fugitive in space. However, this was not always the case for the once-promising actor who stood out as a significant presence in critically acclaimed dramas such as Saving Private Ryan and Boiler Room. Right before he was globe-trotting the world with his Fast & Furious family, Diesel delivered his most emotionally charged performance in the gritty crime-thriller A Man Apart.
Filmed in 2000 and released two years after The Fast and the Furious, Diesel teamed up with director F. Gary Gray (The Negotiator, Set It Off) for the R-rated revenge tale. Gray would later reunite with Diesel, directing the eighth installment of the Fast & Furious franchise — The Fate of the Furious. Intended as a potential franchise for Diesel, A Man Apart was a troubled production due to extensive reshoots following poor test screenings and a lawsuit over its original title Diablo. While Diesel’s Fast & Furious fanbase did not turn out in droves at the time of its release, the film has become an unlikely cult classic in the time since.
Vin Diesel Delivers an Emotionally-Charged Performance in ‘A Man Apart’
Taking cues from the likes of Lethal Weapon and Scarface, Diesel, alongside Larenz Tate, play Sean Vetter and Demetrius Hicks, ex-Los Angeles gang members who turned their lives around, becoming drug enforcement agents. Upon the bust of drug lord Memo Lucero (Geno Silva) in Mexico, the partners’ celebration is short-lived when a mysterious criminal entity named El Diablo takes control of Lucero’s cartel operations between Mexico and southern California. With Lucero’s acquaintances out of the picture, Diablo orders for Vetter’s assassination. The attempt on Vetter’s life goes south when the DEA agent manages to survive his wounds. Unfortunately, his wife Stacy (Jacqueline Obradors) is killed in the process. With Hicks at his side, Vetter goes above and beyond the law to track down Diablo by gunning after his stateside associates Hollywood Jack (Timothy Olyphant) and Hondo (Marco Rodriguez).
The story’s beats are very familiar, like most revenge movies, as Vetter walks the line between upholding the law and going against it in his hunt for Diablo. Rather than drive the picture to Fast & Furious-like spectacular action sequences, A Man Apart attempts to be a compelling melodrama driven by Diesel’s emotionally charged performance full of intense anger instead of quick one-liners. He tries his best to elevate an otherwise clichéd script full of scenes that alternate between Vetter grieving and lashing out against the villains as well as his DEA colleagues.
While Diesel’s Vetter is written like a clone of The Punisher, his natural charisma elevates the oversimplified screenplay. One scene has Vetter intimidating a low-level cocaine dealer with a revolver carrying a single bullet. It’s a scene done many times to the point where it was parodied in the film adaptation of Starsky and Hutch. What makes Diesel’s take on the scene different is how the old gangster life of the character cracks through his otherwise authoritative exterior. He succeeds in contrasting his spark-in-the-eye personality before Stacy’s death to his mentally unstable demeanor after the tragedy.
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‘A Man Apart’ Fails to Have a Compelling Villain
The fatal flaw in A Man Apart’s premise is how it attempts to depict Vetter and Lucero as two sides of the same coin. Some of the film’s biggest highlights involve scenes with Vetter confronting the aging drug lord in a penitentiary to admit to the attempted hit. Both characters’ family lives are well established in the initial scenes of Vetter’s home celebration and Lucero’s concern for his wife and son’s safety while incarcerated. They seem to find a middle ground when Lucero’s family is killed in a car bomb as they now share a common enemy.
The sympathy that the film asks the audience to give Lucero gets thrown out the window when he’s revealed as Diablo upon tricking Vetter out of prison. The shocking twist, which was the result of the film’s final act reshoots, comes out of left field and makes no sense to the overall narrative. Instead of making Lucero a remorseful criminal, the ending twist appears to indicate that he was so upset about Vetter disrupting his upscale lifestyle that he was willing to sacrifice his flesh and blood to regain his power.
A Man Apart is not an action picture forcing themes of “family,” but rather attempts to emphasize the emotional ramifications of violence and revenge. Diesel attempted to loosely update the premise for 2009’s Fast & Furious where his street car hero, Dominic Torreto, is out to avenge the supposed death of longtime girlfriend Letty at the hands of Mexican drug lords. While more successful financially, that film was far more restrained in execution compared to Diesel’s earlier revenge picture.
A Man Apart is streaming on Prime Video in the U.S.
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