An average movie

By now, I have seen almost all the movies starring Vin Diesel (I’m only missing a couple of sequels) and his career basically kept alive by the Riddick and The Fast and the Furious franchises. However, about a decade ago, his status was quite different and there was a time when many thought, myself included, that he could become the next super action movie star. Indeed, when this movie was released, he was basically at the height of his popularity and it would be the last time that he would show up in a movie which could be considered a box-office success and without being a sequel. This time again, Diesel was working with Rob Cohen following their previous success with ‘The Fast and the Furious’ and I thought it was not bad at all. At the time, they all got really excited and thought that it would launch a new modern and hype spy franchise, a next-gen James Bond, and even though this plan sounded good on paper, the terribly lame sequel starring Ice Cube certainly killed any hope in this possible franchise (10 years later, they still talking about a possible 3rd installment starring Vin Diesel but, honestly, who cares now?). Anyway, coming back to our main feature, sure, the plot was really preposterous, but the action scenes were really bad-ass, Vin Diesel was really charismatic and Asia Argento was a surprising but really interesting female sidekick. To conclude, even though it is nothing really amazing, I think it is a decent action flick and it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre.

6/10