Depressingly low-ambition action film about a muscle-bound DEA agent on the trail of revenge for the cross-fire murder of his wife. Or more realistically, about Vin Diesel on the trail of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Seagal, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, take your pick. (The bass tones and the animalistic bellows, in addition to the muscles, put him perhaps closest to the first man on the list.) The hero, a conformist and a club member par excellence, and the furthest thing from a man apart, is a stuntedly adolescent creation whose roots and allegiances are the "streets" and his "homies" (he must not be seen as an authority figure, an Establishment figure), whose wife is a macho man's computer-dating-service ideal (she wears his old football jersey and a backwards baseball cap, leaps into his lap when he's standing up, dances the samba with him on the beach in front of a setting sun and swooping seagulls), and whose grief gives him a periodic excuse for "losing it" -- which doesn't mean he may let a tear fall, but rather let fists and bullets fly, even if it will cause the deaths of three fellow agents. (What the hey! This movie isn't about them.) Director F. Gary Gray "specializes" in action in the same sense as the cook at a greasy spoon might specialize in hash: a sloppy and insalubrious mess which no amount of ketchup can remedy. Larenz Tate, Jacqueline Obradors. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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