The Pacifier

A role apart: Vin Diesel's ill-chosen foray into comedy results in The Pacifier

By Mike Prevatt

Vin Diesel should not be faulted for making brain-dead action movies. And he shouldn't be faulted for trying to broaden his acting range, even if his 2003 drama A Man Apart bombed. In The Pacifier, Diesel is Shane Wolfe, a Navy SEAL officer, which is hardly a stretch from his alpha-male repertoire. However, the twist arrives once he's assigned to protect the children of a government scientist killed on his watch. Such a transition represents not only a seemingly ideal middle ground for Diesel's character, but his filmography.

Yet The Pacifier isn't the perfect choice. If only because it is so poorly written, Diesel might as well have stuck to the shoot-'em-up flicks. If he's going to sell himself as someone who doesn't just blow shit up, he needs a story that allows him a little depth, and dialogue that forces him to shed the tough guy faãade. Yet the writers of The Pacifier tend to limit Diesel's lines to brawny military-speak, and when they do allow him a moment of humanity, he's hampered by gratingly sentimental drivel--hardly a surprise, given that this is being released by Disney, whose family films division gave up on quality control shortly after Walt passed on.

Diesel's stiffness doesn't help matters, either. In fact, it encourages comparisons to Gov. Schwarzenegger, who scored a comedy crossover with 1990's Kindergarten Cop. That film is The Pacifier's most obvious influence, exploiting the pratfalls of authority figure Wolfe, sans kid gloves but armed with a gun, and the children, resistant to their watcher's disciplinary methodology and penchant for structure. As post-Oscar buzz still lingers about his leading role in Sidney Lumet's upcoming courtroom flick Find Me Guilty, Diesel needs to remember that branching out as an actor means choosing roles that don't still amount to typecasting.