“Saving Private Ryan” (1998)
This is still the first role that Diesel apologists point to when trying to make the case that there is more acting juice in him than he’s given credit for. And he is actually very good, one of the handful of members of this big ensemble who is individually memorable, while never showy or selfish about it. Of course, that’s partly thanks to him having one of the most memorable and moving deaths, as his Private Caparzo perishes from a sniper gunshot just feet away from his comrades, clutching a letter for his father while the rain sluices his blood into the mud. Tellingly, the gruff, seen-it-all Caparzo is in part targeted because he’s trying to save a little girl, when even his commanding officer is telling him not to — even at this early stage, a filmmaker like Spielberg could recognize that Diesel’s bulk and growly demeanor would be best served if they were suggested to contain a gentle soul. But the other thing that makes this role work so well here is that it is small, and it is part of a team: Diesel’s ability to generate a kind of camaraderie within a (usually mostly male) group is one of the things that distinguishes a lot of his good roles from his bad, even within the action genre, which is doubtless the reason that the new “xXx” movie sees him put together a team rather than go it alone (also, give him a break, he turns 50 this year). In the hands of a filmmaker as skilled with human touches as Spielberg, that quality is elevated and we feel Caparzo’s death as much for the effect it will have on the rest of the watching soldiers as for the man himself — something Ang Lee was doubtless hoping to replicate in “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” (see below).
“Boiler Room” (2000)
Aside, possibly, from sole family film, and his only all-out comedy, “The Pacifier,” Ben Younger‘s “Boiler Room,” which plays out as if “The Wolf Of Wall Street” and “Glengarry Glen Ross” had a hamfisted, low-IQ lovechild, represents perhaps the most atypical of all Diesel’s non-genre roles. He’s in a suit. He talks on the phone a lot. When he turns around, he doesn’t trip over three scantily clad women surreptitiously suction-cupping themselves to his lats. It may have less to do with the quality of his performance and more to do with the ho-hum-ness of the rest of the film, but let’s put that aside and just say that Diesel is really the standout here, despite playing third or fourth banana to the rest of the young cast. As Chris Varick, the talented “broker” who acts as a mentor to Giovanni Ribisi‘s whitebread greenhorn despite being on a different team within the shady firm, Diesel provides the one character worth giving a damn about. And he’s also the lynchpin of the film’s most memorable scene which, appropriately enough, is all about quoting a better film: As the young cub brokers trade misogynist quips, drink beer and dream of themselves being millionaires who also have no clue what to do with their millions, Varick gets involved in a game of one-upmanship over quoting “Wall Street” word for word. Varick wins, delivering beat-perfect karaoke of Gordon Gekko’s “Lunch is for wimps” monologue, and it’s a testament to Diesel (or again, maybe to how obnoxiously entitled and self-involved all the other characters are) that even despite that, we still kind of care about his character’s fate, and feel the sting of Ribisi’s betrayal on his behalf.
“Knockaround Guys” (2001)
The troubled times that lie ahead can sometimes make one feel a little nostalgic for the recent past, but rewatching “Knockaround Guys” offers a good reminder that the turn of the millennium was, at least in some ways, the worst. It’s not that Brian Koppelman and David Levien‘s gangster film is terrible per se, just that it feels so creakily overfamiliar as to be instantaneously forgettable, which is no mean feat for a film that features John Malkovich and Dennis Hopper. A “Pulp Fiction“/Tarantino wannabe way after that sort of thing should have died down, it’s also a kind of “Young Guns” take on “Goodfellas,” following four friends (Barry Pepper, Andrew Davoli, Seth Green and Diesel) who all happen to be the sons of New York mob bosses. Pepper’s Matty struggles with the viciousness of the family business in a way that Diesel’s Taylor does not, however, and once again the very things that should make Diesel the dullest character — his machismo and brawn — are what make him the most interesting. Where Matty’s arc is that he finally has the balls to shoot someone (a major therapeutic breakthrough, obviously), Taylor’s is not so obvious. He has no moral qualms about violence, but a strain of bitterness at that fact makes his conflict, as the loyal henchman sidekick, far more involving than that of the dyspeptic Matty, whose need to impress his old man ends up getting half his friends killed.
“Find Me Guilty” (2006)
With the greatest of respect to Rob Cohen, Justin Lin and James Gunn, there’ve only been a few times that Diesel has worked with the kind of directors who regularly get dubbed “auteurs” without the word “vulgar” preceding the label. Steven Spielberg and Ang Lee are among them, but the one major outlier, in that he cast Diesel in a lead, is Sidney Lumet. And it’s a shame that this title, based on the true story of the longest-running Mafia trial in history, is so neglected, as it’s not only the most non-action Diesel we’ve ever got, but also the best. Playing up the ebullient, even comical side of his persona (“I’m a gagster, not a gangster!”), Diesel is really terrific as Jackie DiNorscio, the low-level mafioso who, in contrast to his lawyered-up-to-the-teeth cohorts, decides to represent himself in court when they’re all indicted on massive conspiracy and racketeering charges. The film’s tone is perhaps a little unconvincing — there’s something sour about playing Jackie’s cookie-jar disingenuousness for laughs when the gangsterism he participated in had real human cost — but that’s not Diesel’s fault. Indeed, he strikes exactly the right balance between blunt, profane charm and truculent, bullheaded loyalty throughout. And though it might seem like a wild detour away from his regular transmissions, there is one aspect of Jackie’s character that crops up time and again in Diesel’s portfolio: an almost pathological devotion to the idea of family — whether blood relations or not. Whether it’s Dom Toretto repeating “familia” ad nauseam throughout the last three ‘Fast & Furious’ installments, Rick from “Strays” finally going to visit his mom, Private Caparzo begging his fellow soldiers to get his letter to his father with his dying breath, or DiNorscio refusing to rat on the cousin who has just shot him and repeatedly telling the dons how much he loves them, Diesel always, in some way, plays a family man. But he does it so distinctively here that this is the film that, more than any other, convinces us that there might be fresh and exciting ways for Diesel to spin his persona in the future.
“Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” (2016)
In terms of importance, it’s fairly far down the list of flaws in Ang Lee‘s perplexingly bland “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” but the casting of Vin Diesel feels almost perfectly indicative of the lack of inspiration from which the whole film suffers. On the surface, it’s the kind of counter-intuitive casting coup that sounds promising — brawny action star does sensitive prestige movie! — but that’s before you see it and notice his role is essentially an amalgam of his “Saving Private Ryan” turn and his standard-issue soulful tough-guy persona. Maybe that’s part of the reasoning: His Staff Sergeant “Shroom” Breen plays a pivotal part in hero Billy Lynn’s psychology, but is granted very little screen time, so perhaps it’s a bonus that we can read so much outside information into those few glimpses. Shroom is an elder-brotherly, if not a fatherly, figure to the younger troops, described at his funeral as a man who’d stroll around base camp reciting Allen Ginsberg poetry, and shown in one quiet moment dispensing hard-won theological wisdom to Billy. And so even this sliver of a role, in an awards-baiting movie based on a bestselling book, from an immensely respected director, manages to check off every box on the Vin Diesel Movie Character Trait list: Shroom’s physically tough, an inspiring leader, a brave soldier and a loyal friend bound to his men like family, but he’s also, in being in touch with his spirituality and alive to the beauty of beat poetry, a kind of philosopher. The wisdom he shares here may be a little more complex and enigmatic than the cereal-box platitudes Dom Toretto shares with his crew, but in essence, this role is not so far from the ones that made Diesel a star. Even when he plays against type, he plays to type.
The definitive proof of whether Diesel’s action bona-fides can really transition outside the ‘Fast and Furious’ franchise will undoubtedly come this weekend with “xXx: Return Of That Guy From The First Movie Whose Name No One Really Remembered Anyway.” And we can’t but hope that they do, because despite his narrow range and the often dumb-as-rocks nature of his films, we always kind of root for the guy: After all, he can’t consistently play almost the same character and not kind of be like him. And if nothing else, that character — heavy-lidded dime-store philosopher trapped in the body of a Jersey Shore gym rat, adorned with a voice like hailstones on pebbledash — is likable.
Even if he strikes out this time, he’s got a couple of pretty sure bets coming up anyway in 2017, in the shape of “Fate Of The Furious,” and “Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2.” But ‘xXx3’ might just be the ticket for numbing the brain after tomorrow’s shenanigans — a two-hour escape into the comfortingly familiar world of Vin Diesel in his natural element: stupid stunts and nonsense plotting, a universe in which politics can, for a couple of hours, take a back seat to kicking ass, getting the girl and looking dope while you’re doing it.
