Tom Jolliffe looks at the once promising acting career of Vin Diesel…
Before you recheck the site address to make sure you’ve not wandered into a piece about renewable energy, no you are not in the wrong place. No, I’m talking Vin Diesel.
Upon bursting onto the scene in the enjoyable sci-fi horror, Pitch Black, Diesel showed immense promise. From his humble beginnings as an indie film-maker taking control of his own destiny with his highly regard short Multi-Facial, and then the long delayed feature, Strays, it seemed a potentially interesting new character actor was on the horizon. People watch Diesel now and perhaps don’t recall the days when he was flitting between interesting support turns prior to The Fast and Furious really breaking him out in a big way. Whether it was Boiler Room, or his small role in Saving Private Ryan, and most particularly that scene stealing turn as the antagonist, Riddick in Pitch Black, Vin Diesel was brimming with charisma and a quality that felt a little different.
In that first outing as Dominic Toretto, Diesel elevated what was otherwise a fairly formulaic rip off of Point Break. Sure the film was nowhere near as good as that, and respectively Diesel and Walker were no Swayze and Reeves, but it was fun. He dipped out of the next two films (bar a teasing cameo in Tokyo Drift) but by the time Vin came back his career elsewhere had hit the skids. An ill conceived attempt to broaden the enigmatic Riddick in a wider universe failed with the disastrous Chronicles of Riddick. XXX was essentially Fast and Furious with snowboarding and offered little more than grunting duties for a star kind of disappearing into his own hype a little, albeit successful.
There was still time for Diesel to divert back into a character piece with Find Me Guilty. Whilst it will not attest the once great powers of its director, Sidney Lumet (particularly in court procedure cinema) it still showed a side to Diesel that we were promised in his earlier works.
Step forward through a whole host more Fast films, another Riddick outing, another Xander Cage outing and a lot of forgettable blockbusters in between (a lot of which flopped) and his more recent highlights amount to saying “I am Groot” repeatedly with a voice effect utilised. In the Fast franchise Diesel slowly began to get overshadowed by Dwayne Johnson, which would ultimately lead to well publicised friction between the two. His role as Toretto has been reduced to mumbling ‘family’ repeatedly ad nauseam. From his return onward, Paul Walker began to represent the humility and heart of the franchise. His loss was felt hugely in the last film. In fact it’s odd that a franchise that was once Diesel powered, but feels like it could actually live without Vin.
Why? He’s just repeating his character. Not merely from this film but he’s now basically almost interchangeable whether he’s Cage, or the dude in Bloodshot, or the dude in Babylon A.D. What happened to the charismatic guy from Boiler Room? Or that magnetic presence that fizzled in Pitch Black? With Bloodshot, a film that has had absolutely no buzz or hype, now coming into an unfortunately timed pandemic, it looks like another bomb on Diesel’s plate outside of his franchise work. If he’s not playing Richard B Riddick, or Toretto, or Groot, or to a lesser extent, Xander Cage, it appears that no one wants to know.
Is there a certain arrogance there where Diesel wants to be a movie star more than an artist? Could he not go indie and start doing the work it seemed he might do in his early days? It’s probably time, at 53, he began thinking of moving back to character acting as opposed to being a mono-syllabic action guy (with less charisma and likeability than his arch nemesis Dwayne). Bloodshot was never really going to do well, even without the added issue of cinema goers actively avoiding the multiplex now. Though the Chinese market not being available now has also been problematic for a star who is still very popular in Asia. With The Last Witch Hunter 2 seemingly on the cards (did people watch the first one?) it would seem Diesel’s choices aren’t getting any better.
Tom Jolliffe is an award winning screenwriter and passionate cinephile. He has a number of films out on DVD/VOD around the world and several releases due in 2020, including The Witches Of Amityville Academy (starring Emmy winner, Kira Reed Lorsch) and Tooth Fairy: The Root of Evil. Find more info at the best personal site you’ll ever see here.
Originally published March 15, 2020. Updated November 29, 2022.
