The Bottom Line: Vin Diesel’s Career No Longer Fast or Furious

Vin Diesel‘s running on fumes, and he knows it.

So he’s traded in xXx‘s souped-up GTO for a minivan suitable for a suburban soccer mom.

With The Pacifier, the monosyllabic muscleman tries to rev up his stalled career by pulling an Arnuld. As with Kindergarten Cop, which allowed Arnold Schwarzenegger to poke fun at his tough-guy image, Disney’s PG-rated The Pacifier finds hardened Navy SEAL Diesel protecting five cute kids from their very bad dad.

Schwarzenegger didn’t go undercover as the Kindergarten Cop in an act of desperation. He was coming off was then his biggest hit, Total Recall, and he had already shown a willingness to laugh at himself with Twins.

Diesel, though, is hurting following the disasters that were Knockaround Guys and A Man Apart.

	Diesel’s Box Office Highs
		1. Saving Private Ryan   $216.5M
		2. The Fast and the Furious     $144.5M
		3. xXx   $142.5M
		4. Pitch Black    $39.2M

Worse, he gambled by bailing on the xXx and The Fast and the Furious franchises, only to end up backing a loser in the Pitch Black sequel, The Chronicles of Riddick.

Diesel says he’s not interested in making a sequel–be it 2 Fast 2 Furious or the upcoming xXx: State of the Union–for the sake of making a sequel.

OK, let’s take that at face value, and ignore that Diesel reportedly out-priced himself out of 2 Fast 2 Furious with his demands for $20 million. It’s admirable that Diesel doesn’t want to suffer from a severe case of sequelitis so soon after becoming a household name.

And it’s understandable why he would devote his attention to The Chronicles of Riddick, an ambitious attempt to continue the adventures of Diesel‘s taciturn killing machine without Xeroxing Pitch Black. If Pitch Black was Diesel‘s Alien, Riddick was his Dune. The sequel jettisoned Pitch Black‘s nocturnal extraterrestrials in favor of religious fanatics dedicated to converting nonbelievers through death and destruction. But Universal did a lousy job of marketing Riddick–early trailers barely featured Diesel and failed to draw a direct connection to Pitch Black–and the absence of aliens resulted in an absence of an audience.

Riddick‘s failure compounds the perception that Diesel isn’t really the heir apparent to Schwarzenegger or Stallone, as The Fast and the Furious and xXx suggested.

In hindsight, with or without Diesel behind the wheel, The Fast and the Furious still would have roared to $144.5 million. The endless parade of flashy cars and sexy ladies clearly made the street-racing thriller a smash, as evidenced by the Diesel-less 2 Fast 2 Furious.

Another test of Diesel‘s value–or lack of–to a series comes in late April with xXx: State of the Union, which no longer features his Xander Cage. If audiences accept Ice Cube as the NSA’s newest rule-breaking agent, then it’s painfully obvious that Diesel needs these franchises more than they need him.

The Pacifier likely offers a temporary quick fix to Diesel‘s woes. Parents should feel comfortable during the spring break taking their kids to this fish-out-of-water farce directed by Bringing Down the House‘s Adam Shankman. But teens who rode shotgun with Diesel in The Fast and the Furious won’t reach for The Pacifier.

	Diesel’s Box Office Lows
		1. Knockaround Guys   $11.7M
		2. Boiler Room    $16.9M
		3. A Man Apart   $26.7M
		4. The Chronicles of Riddick   $57.7M

Nor will they packed the courtroom for the upcoming Find Me Guilty. In what sounds like an old-school legal drama, Diesel sheds his bald, beefcake ways–he’s got hair!–to stretch as an actor in a way he hasn’t since Steven Spielberg‘s Saving Private Ryan. And he’s finally working again with a respected director, Sidney Lumet, who made such classics as Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and The Verdict.

As an insurance policy, Diesel‘s dropped hints about sliding into the driver’s seat for The Fast and the Furious 3. But he’s to yet to commit. Perhaps he’s waiting to see how The Pacifier fares. He needs a hit if he wants to realize his dream of directing Hannibal the Conqueror. No one’s going to risk $50 million on a historical epic about the 3rd-century Carthaginian general if Diesel constantly crashes at the box office.

The Bottom Line

Does Diesel have the comic chops necessary to make us laugh? If he does, then The Pacifier will make us forget his disinterest in a return to the Xander Zone. If not, then The Fast and the Furious 3 is built to succeed. Hypocritical? Yes, considering Diesel had no compunction about abandoning 2 Fast 2 Furious. But if Diesel wants to direct Hannibal the Conqueror, and pursue other such coveted projects as a Guys and Dolls remake, he made not have any choice but to hit the road again.