In a few decades’ time, when you’re bouncing your grandson on your knee and he looks up at you with huge, innocent eyes and asks, through the respirator he needs to filter the unbreathable air, “Meemoo, where were you when America fell?”, it is a source of some perverse joy that at least some of you will be able to gaze dreamily out across the barren, scarred landscape and reply, “Watching Vin Diesel ride a motorbike underwater.” Tomorrow, two equally momentous and potentially world-changing events take place: the inauguration of the first American president to be made entirely of Spam and spray cheese, and the opening of “xXx: Return of Xander Cage.” One of them promises to be a brainless, garish, incoherent, noisy, lowest-common-denominator spectacle; the other is the second sequel to Rob Cohen‘s “xXx” (2002).
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The first “xXx” sequel was directed by Bond veteran Lee Tamahori in 2005 and was subtitled “State Of The Union” (which suggests that not having this installment’s title refer in some way to the coincidence of the inauguration is a bit of a missed trick). It featured just as ludicrous a plot and just as many deeply unlikely stunts, and in general was not a million miles away from the lunkheaded escapism of its predecessor. Except it unceremoniously killed off Xander Cage aka Diesel (who was reportedly asking for too much money) in a line or two of dialogue, and replaced him with a surly, burly Darius Stone aka Ice Cube. ‘State Of The Union’ took roughly a quarter of the original’s box office.
It’s too much, however, to make Diesel the key factor in the first film’s success and his absence the sole cause of the sequel’s failure. More often than not, when Diesel has launched a bid for solo, leading-man, potential franchise stardom, he has floundered: His passion-project follow-up to moderate hit “Pitch Black,” “The Chronicles Of Riddick,” was an expensive failure, and the concluding part of the trilogy, 2013’s “Riddick,” was only profitable because it came in at around a third of the budget of ‘Chronicles.’ But at least that actually made it to three installments: The less said about would-be franchises like “Babylon A.D.” and “The Last Witch Hunter,” the better.
Even his stab at the usually reliably lucrative “grizzled revenge flick” genre, “A Man Apart,” tanked amid murderous reviews and audience indifference, despite so many of the usual ingredients, such as F. Gary Gray directing and a Standard Dead Wife plot, being in place. For galling contrast, Gray’s next Dead Wife Vengeance movie, 2009’s “Law Abiding Citizen,” made nearly three times as much money, despite boasting stars (Gerard Butler, Jamie Foxx) that were neither Fast nor Furious.
But, boom — there we have it, the first mention of “The Fast And The Furious,” which is the franchise that means Diesel doesn’t really need any other franchises, and whose cumulative box office now hovers dangerously near the $4 billion mark. It’s a fascinating case study for the almost organic way a movie franchise can evolve and adapt and course-correct for maximum buck-bang: Witness the jumpy chronology around the series’ lowest performer, ‘Tokyo Drift‘ (also the only one to not star Diesel, who cameos); marvel at how once the “Fast Five” gamble paid off (the petrolhead narrative morphing into a heist-movie dynamic), it became the template for the increa$ingly $ucce$$ful subsequent episodes; swoon at the ever-expanding cast of action A-listers so that the current lineup feels like a fresher-faced “Expendables” — an epic, all-star team-up far removed from the quaint, two-hander bro-dom of the original.
Diesel has served as producer on every Fast and/or Furious film since the fourth, which, perhaps not coincidentally, was also the first one to start making serious, serious bank. Since then, the take has gone up film after film: a quarter of a billion here, another $150m there, until the jaw-dropping double-the-previous-one success of “Furious 7,” the sixth highest-grossing film of all time worldwide, which alone contributes over $1.5 billion to the franchise’s $4 billion total haul. There’s no doubt that Vin Diesel is now a very rich man and a powerful Hollywood player. But if he tends to falter outside of that framework, how big a star is he really? How versatile? How adaptable? How much has ‘The Fast and the Furious” pigeonholed and curtailed his outside prospects, and how much is it the apotheosis of what might actually be a pretty inflexible persona?
Diesel, outside his defining franchise, is actually a more interesting prospect than he might first appear. Did you know, for example, that his first directorial effort — the short film “Multi-Facial,” in which he also stars — was selected by Cannes? It is loosely based on his experiences as an “ethnically ambiguous” actor undergoing the ritual humiliations and struggles of the Hollywood audition circus, and reportedly Steven Spielberg was impressed enough by it to cast Diesel in “Saving Private Ryan.” That ambiguity — Diesel’s exact ethnic melange is unclear, but he identifies as non-white and was raised by his white mother and black stepfather — is also a key part of his star persona, albeit one rarely directly commented on in his films, where he most often plays undefined Latin types viz. him being the brunt of Italian-American cliche insults in 2000’s “Boiler Room,” and the vowels that dangle off the end of many of his characters’ names: Toretto, Caparzo, DiNorscio.
Even before “Saving Private Ryan” shot, Diesel had gone the full Olivier, writing, directing, producing and starring in his feature directorial debut, “Strays” (which we get into below). And though he’s so far removed from the indie movie circuit nowadays as to make it seem wildly implausible, “Strays” played the Sundance Film Festival, where Diesel briefly became the toast of Salt Lake City, attracting a deal from MTV to develop it into a TV series, and being attached as director to a Jay McInerney-scripted film called “Nightcall” for Interscope Communications. Obviously, neither of those projects ever came about, giving a slightly rueful retrospective cast to Diesel’s assertion that Sundance and all that sudden popularity had been “like a fairytale.”
But however all that shook out, he clearly didn’t burn his bridges with Interscope, as in 2000, they produced his first starring vehicle, David Twohy‘s “Pitch Black,” and with the first ‘Fast And Furious‘ movie coming up the following year, and “xXx” the year after that, it’s tempting to regard that as the end of the story, certainly as far as the Vin Diesel: My Struggle narrative goes. Except that a closer examination of Diesel’s filmography reveals a slightly more complex picture: Like so many of his characters, he is happy to capitalize on his intimidating physical presence and gravel-driveway voice, but he also wants to be more than just a pair of biceps to be clung to. It’s the root of Diesel’s charm that no matter how winkingly self-aware he is in individual films (and he’s never going to steal Fast/Furious stablemates Dwayne Johnson or Jason Statham‘s crowns in that regard), he is humorlessly sincere in his work ethic, and also in his total faith that while the brawn goes without saying, his characters must always have brains and heart and street smarts and all those good things. In his many genre titles, Diesel (unlike Johnson and Statham) has never played dumb, and his characters never lose. Or rather, even when they lose, they really win.
“xXx: Return Of Xander Cage” is unlikely to break that mold, the story of an extreme-sports enthusiast turned high-octane spy who has presumably returned from the dead somehow, is hardly the time for Diesel to start moving in a more vérité direction. However, there have been times that Diesel has worked a little outside his comfort zone (presumably The Danger Zone) and ditched the base jumping and wanton Ferrari destruction for “respectable” drama. Do these six films represent the tip of an enormous iceberg of largely untapped thespian talent? Or is it a case of being able to take the Diesel out of the petrolhead franchise but not being able to do the reverse? Only one way to find out…run through them with us:
“Strays”(1997)
If you need convincing that Vin Diesel’s stardom poses a unique kind of riddle, just examine, say “Fast Five” alongside his 1997 semi-autobiographical feature directorial debut. It’s the loose-limbed story of Rick, a low-level New York dealer (Diesel) who experiences a kind of quarter-life crisis when he decides there’s more to life than being a legend among his bumbling, pussy-hungry bros and grudgingly consenting to bang whichever lascivious stripper or waitress gets her hands on him that night. As such, there’s a sight fewer cars being dropped out of airplanes than in his signature role, but what’s even more striking is how much DNA Dominic Toretto and Rick share. Maybe that’s because Diesel has always wanted it both ways: Rick’s a swaggering, streetwise, broken-home tough guy — gold chain, white undershirt, hair-trigger temper. But he’s also tortured by being so much more than that, by having Deep Thoughts undreamed of by his testosterone-fueled posse and a sensitive side that knows all the words to the Tin Man’s song from “The Wizard Of Oz.” This is proven when he sings it (the whole thing, verses and refrain) to woo his ethereal, cultured, lily-white, middle-class neighbor Heather (Suzanne Lanza). “Strays” is not very good — it is indifferently shot and much too convinced that we’re going to be as fascinated as Diesel is by this empty-headed romance and the inner torment of a misunderstood muscleman trying to change in the most schematic way imaginable (visiting his estranged mother, ordering fancy wine in a restaurant, etc.). But as a time capsule, it’s both illuminating and alarming: Toretto is older and wiser and a hell of a lot slicker, but his bulging pecs, irresistibility to women, position as the lynchpin of his little tribe — all of whom he can outthink with ease — are all Rick.