A Man Apart: Movie & DVD Review (2003)

(Originally published 2003)

If your last film sounded as if it were promoting porn and if it featured you parading about in a sheepskin pimp coat, where would you go from there? Straight into counseling? Perhaps to a bar? Maybe into a coma?

Not Vin Diesel.

Fresh from the success of "XXX," the actor now takes to the screen in "A Man Apart," a violent revenge drama directed by F. Gary Gray that was shot before the actor’s big hits, “XXX" and "The Fast and the Furious,” but which has been sitting on a studio shelf for years because of problems with its ending.

Those problems remain well intact, but now, with Diesel firmly established as a headlining star, the film has been dusted off, reworked in an editing bay and, for better or worse, released in theaters.

As directed by Gray from a script by Christian Gudegast and Paul Scheuring, the film stars Diesel as Sean Vetter, a former L.A. thug turned DEA agent who is psychologically torn apart after the brutal murder of his wife, Stacy (Jacqueline Obradors), “the love of his life, the only thing he had” who died in a bloody shootout at their beachside home.

Who stuck it to Stacy? For Vetter, it comes down to two feared drug kingpins: Memo Lucero (Geno Silva), the conniving Colombian drug lord Vetter and his partner, Demetrius (Larenz Tate), capture and lock away early in the film, and the elusive El Diablo, a mysterious man determined to keep pushing cocaine from Mexico to California, regardless of Vetter’s threats to strangle his operation.

Convinced that El Diablo is his man, Vetter enlists Demetrius and his old gangbanging buddy, Big Sexy (George Sharperson), to help find the creep and avenge Stacy’s death.

In spite of what its characters’ names suggest, what ensues is not the cartoon action fantasies of “XXX” and “Furious,” but a movie that has energy, rage and heart to spare, so much so that it codes midway through and collapses on screen in one big, convoluted mess.

The problem with “A Man Apart” isn’t what you might expect—it’s not Diesel, who took the role knowing he’d have to act and does a fair job of it here, holding the screen with the same charisma and intensity he showcased in “Boiler Room” while only occasionally overdoing it with Vetter’s anger management issues.

Instead, what unhinges the movie is its ongoing lapses in logic. For instance, how can Vetter, a DEA agent earning a modest salary, afford what’s clearly a multimillion-dollar beachside retreat? How does he have the power to release Memo to another prison when he’s no longer with the force? When El Diablo’s identity is revealed in the awful, out-of-left-field ending, it’s immediately clear that he could have killed Vetter any number of times. So why didn’t he?

You tell me.

Grade: D+