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Who Is Diablo In A Man Apart

In “A Man Apart,” Vin Diesel-the glowering, bullet-headed star of “The Fast and the Furious” and “XXX”-plays another surly, hot-tempered action hero: ex-L.A. gangbanger turned DEA agent Sean Vetter, who joins up with fellow gangster-turned-narc Demetrius Hicks (Larenz Tate) and boss cop Ty Frost (Steve Eastin) to wage brutal war against the Baja Cartel, a murderous Mexican drug ring. Along the way, he also tries to avenge the murder of his wife Stacy (Jacqueline Obradors) by cartel agents.

Just as in his other recent movies, Diesel—one of the meanest Hollywood action heroes to snarl his way through a chase scene-faces and delivers nearly non-stop violence. After capturing and jailing one cartel leader, the notorious and super-wealthy Guillermo “Memo” Lucero (played by Geno Silva of “Scarface”), Sean is suddenly confronted with another crime king, the sinister and unseen Diablo, whose identity, like Keyser Soze in “The Usual Suspects,” remains a mystery for much of “A Man Apart.” As the body count rises, Sean is driven outside the law-a man without a badge, without restraints and without mercy.

Diesel is moodier and more morose than he was in his big, star-making movies. In a way, you can see why. There’s not much joy or exhilaration in “Man Apart,” except for an early beach beer party, which seems to have been included so we can miss the fun and the dead Stacy for the rest of the movie. Directed by F. Gary Gray (“Friday,” “The Negotiator”) this is a patchwork thriller composed of fragments borrowed from “The French Connection,” “Dirty Harry,” “Hard to Kill,” “Scarface” and even “The Silence of the Lambs,” a grim, bloody show that puts both Sean and us through the wringer. It’s fast, brutal, moody, semi-incoherent and borderline crazy, and those are also all adjectives you might apply to Sean, whose personality doesn’t seem to have evolved too far from his gangbanger youth.

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That’s part of the main point of the movie: It takes a thief to catch a thief, or an ex-gangbanger to catch a drug lord. “A Man Apart” tries to get the audience to enjoy the pleasures of anti-social behavior by showing us cops who act like crooks. Sean and his guys snare Memo in the first ten minutes, rousting him from a Mexican orgy and ignoring his threats. Later on, Sean, in a way, even enlists Memo’s aid in trying to find and disrupt Diablo’s takeover of Memo’s territory, run locally by vicious minions like Hollywood Jack Slayton (Timothy Olyphant), a sleazy hairdresser.

But “A Man Apart” is also a movie that makes almost no sense. (At one point, Sean gets drug king Memo transferred to another prison, even though he’s been suspended.) It’s thick and ugly and puts you in the same sour, glum mood as its hero. The film finished shooting in early 2001 and has been on the shelf for much of the time since then, released now because of the commercial impact of Diesel’s recent movies. Actually, it’s a better movie than “xXx,” but that’s not hard. Despite huge success, “xXx’ was a chaotic, mind-numbing, cliche-ridden mess.

“A Man Apart” at least has some moments of feeling, though most of the feelings it generates are dark. Throughout the movie, Sean glowers at a succession of scummy murderers and crooks, most of whom die like dogs, though not quite soon enough. The one exception: Olyphant (“Go,” “Dreamcatcher”) as Hollywood Jack. He’s the movie’s best character: a slimy L. A. hedonist dressed in capri pants, who keeps throwing funny hissy-fits. (In some ways, he seems modeled on the young Jack Nicholson.) Hollywood Jack is so nastily engaging, that when he eventually makes an exit, I lost all hope for the movie.

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Diesel is a forceful actor, and in the right kind of vehicle, like “Saving Private Ryan” or “Pitch Black,” he can make a big impression. The latest in a string of movie tough guys so popular they become movie heroes, like Humphrey Bogart, Charles Bronson, Walter Matthau or Benicio Del Toro, Diesel seems even more than the others a natural-so sneery and sadistic he’s scarier than the killers he catches.

After a couple of hours with this picture, I began to feel that life was garbage, people were garbage and movies were garbage as well. That’s not necessarily what the moviemakers want you to feel; Gray has a slick, video-derived style that keeps the film jumping along even when the characters and plot have all but disintegrated. “A Man Apart” has such an unpleasant but strong mood and feel, you almost get the idea that with a decent script, Gray and Diesel could be dynamite. In “Apart,” they simply blow up the movie’s credibility, something I hope bothers the audience as much as it should. Sometimes, you can use a smaller devil to catch the Devil, the movie suggests, but in this case, the entire movie goes to hell in record time.

`A Man Apart’

(star)1/2

Directed by F. Gary Gray; written by Christian Gudegast, Paul T. Scheuring; photographed by Jack N. Green; edited by Robert Brown, Sean Hubbert; production designed by Ida Random; music by Dr. Dre, Anne Dudley; produced by Robert John Degus, Vincent Newman, Joseph Nittolo, Tucker Tooley. A New Line Cinema release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:54.MPAA rating: R (language, violence and sensuality).

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Sean Vetter ……………… Vin Diesel

Demetrius Hicks ………….. Larenz Tate

Ty Frost ………………… Steve Eastin

Hollywood Jack Slayton ……. Timothy Olyphant

Stacy Vetter …………….. Jacqueline Obradors

Guillermo “Memo” Lucero …… Geno Silva

Mateo Santos …………….. Juan Fernandez

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