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Last night I began building a house of cards. I began building
a deliberate yet awkwardly designed house of hearts and spades.
It was going steadily as I grew anxious for the end result when
halfway through, my deliberate house of cards fell crashing to the
ground. Oh, the disappointment!! This analogy is more than fitting
for the film, A Man Apart, the latest Vin Diesel vehicle.
“A Man Apart” begins at an exciting pace as the movie opens on
Sean Vetter (Vin Diesel) and his sidekick Demetrius Hicks (Larenz
Tate), two DEA officers (Drug Enforcement Agency) about to raid
the luxurious hideout of an elusive drug cartel leader named Memo.
Memo’s brooding drug cartel in Mexico supplies 80% of cocaine to
the United States. Demetrius along with a cavalcade of cops proceed
to take down the hideout in a blaze of bullets as Sean singlehandly
captures Memo.
An ensuing celebratory beach party in California displays these
agents’ lives: their wives, girlfriends, children and friends. Particularly
poignant and emphasized is Sean's love for his wife, Stacy, played
by Jacqueline Obradors. After a cheesy sunset display of their total
unfettered pleasure in each other, the drama resumes as Stacy is
killed later that night. I was pleased with the originality towards
the end of the death scene. Sean, the heroic action hero is unable
to react as he watches Stacy’s life ebb out of her. The rest of
the movie follows Sean and Demetrius as they track Stacy’s killer.
Along the way, with help from the now incarcerated Memo, they discover
that Stacy’s death is linked to a new drug lord called “Diablo.”
Diablo is a mysterious figure hell bent on taking over Memo’s now
hapless cartel. Diablo’s first confrontation is with a street level
cocaine dealer who hides in the ceiling of a crack house after his
comrades have been killed. One comrade has his throat slashed through
which his tongue is pulled through. Another has the name “Diablo”
carved into the flesh of his back while another is strangled to
death with barbed wire. Why Diablo would care to confront street
level dealers as the head of a new cartel is just one of many clueless
upcoming plot devices.
At this point, the House of Man falls Apart delving into a tedious
game of menacing stares , vapid confrontations and nonsensical dead-end
plot lines in the search for Diablo (even the name is formulaic).
I along with the audience grew from disappointed to flat out bored
as the film tinkled down into a puddle of give up. It seems the
writer just gave up with writing the plot and characters. In fact,
it seems he grew bored himself and made up the rest of the film
with no regards to the first part. Vin Diesel tries hard to be the
anguished and vengeful cop who reverts to an almost barbaric state.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t display vengeance all that well. You feel
his anguish but not his desire to find Stacy’s killer. Larenz Tate
is relegated to the dutiful sidekick whose goal is to “get Vin’s
back.” Larenz is always a good time in a movie but it’s clearly
he’s just coasting along. In the end, “A Man Apart” falls apart
amidst a dusty cocaine induced haze.
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