Vin Diesel in Pitch Black USA Films
More than almost any other movie star working today, Vin Diesel seems to think only in franchises. Skim the last two decades of this muscle man’s filmography, and you’ll see almost nothing but sequels or movies designed (not always successfully) to spawn sequels. Once Vin got a taste of life in the fast lane, he never really looked back. Maybe he was always just destined to become a Hollywood action hero: When you’re built like a bullet and talk like a subwoofer, the Italian Stallion career path makes a lot more sense than anything else.
Of course, like Sly Stallone, Vin didn’t start out making multiplex cash grabs. Before he was Dominic Toretto, Xander Cage, and Groot, Diesel was a hungry young actor, more focused on honing his craft than bulging his biceps. In the ’90s, he even dabbled in writing and directing, penning his own gritty, calling-card starring vehicle; it was that indie drama, Strays, that caught Steven Spielberg’s attention and earned Diesel a breakout role in Saving Private Ryan. To watch him there or in the late Sidney Lumet’s swan song, Find Me Guilty, is to be reminded of a time when the big guy aspired to a little more than bankable machismo.
What’s wild is that you can pinpoint to the day the pinnacle of Diesel’s time as a dramatic performer as opposed to a box-office draw. Said day was 25 years ago tomorrow, when not one but two movies featuring the future star hit theaters nationwide. There he was as a likable off- Wall Street stock broker in the financial drama Boiler Room, and there he was again as a mythic outlaw in the deep-space creature feature Pitch Black. Diesel has never been better than he was in these two very different movies, which kind of makes February 18th, 2000 the best day of his career — and also the last moment before that career changed directions.
Boiler Room (2000) Official Trailer #1 - Vin Diesel Movie HD
Of the two films, Boiler Room is the more obvious acting showcase, though Vin has a much smaller part in it. Written and directed by Ben Younger, this Martin Scorsese-indebted procedural essentially fictionalizes the true story the actual Scorsese would later dramatize with The Wolf of Wall Street. Younger looks at the fraudulent practices of brokerage houses like Stratton Oakmont from the perspective of one of the cold callers, a Long Island entrepreneur played by Giovanni Ribisi. Maybe fourth or fifth booked in the cast is Diesel, who steps in as one of the more experienced brokers who takes Ribisi’s snake-oil salesman under his wing.
“He’s like gravity —everything gets pulled to him,” is how someone describes Diesel’s most famous character, Dominic Toretto, in the following year’s franchise-launching melodrama The Fast and the Furious. But he’s much more conventionally magnetic in Boiler Room as a slick but approachable young millionaire swindler. Vin’s first big scene in the movie puts his signature bravado to good use, as he gregariously coerces a doctor into buying a bunch of shares over the phone — a hard sell that he makes look effortless. It’s a kind of initiation, laying out the seductive thrill of how these chop-shop frat boys make their fortune. They’re really just actors, playing a part for the clients they unscrupulously exploit.
Diesel’s Chris Varick, like Toretto, is as much teddy bear as shark, though. Boiler Room positions him as a big brother for Ribisi— the warm alternative to Nicky Katt’s jealous, competitive bullpen prick. The script’s pages of shop talk (the kind of industry exposition that Scorsese waved off with a fourth-wall-breaking wink from Leo) go down smoother when delivered in Diesel’s low rumble and New York accent. And Chris becomes an unlikely figure of redemption at the ending, confronted by both the impending collapse of his livelihood and the opportunity to do one noble thing before it all comes crashing down. That makes Boiler Room the first in a long line of movies that find the conscience burning within Diesel’s bad-boy routine.
Pitch Black Official Trailer #1 - Vin Diesel Movie (2000) HD
A secret flicker of decency also defines Richard B. Riddick, the apprehended mercenary Diesel plays for the first time in Pitch Black. In terms of temperament and vocabulary, he’s a much different animal than Varick: a stony Western archetype unleashed onto the final frontier, like Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name airdropped into an Alien knockoff. Writer-director David Twohy builds Riddick up, establishing his fearsome bona fides by keeping him chained, shrouded in darkness, and silent for the first act, when the ship carting this dangerous fugitive crash-lands on a planet with three suns and some deadly nocturnal wildlife. Beyond the opening voice-over, Diesel doesn’t utter a word for the first 30 minutes of the movie.
More than Toretto, that marble-mouthed, messianic Robin Hood patriarch always mumbling about family, Riddick is the quintessential Vin Diesel character. Twohy leans on and inflates his comic-book physicality – the bulkiness that caught the actor bouncer gigs before he went Hollywood. And he streamlines that familiar Diesel braggadocio into a cucumber cool, the poise of a post-human bruiser in touch with his wild side. His performance in Pitch Black arguably comes closer to approximating the original conception of Wolverine than the one Hugh Jackman would deliver, for the first time, a few months later in the first X-Men movie. Diesel is so convincing here as an animalistic loner that his eventual, reluctant call to be a team-player, à la Logan, packs the desired punch.
Less blockbuster than glorified sci-fi programmer, Pitch Black didn’t make boatloads of money. But it was a successful proof of concept; what it sold the world was Diesel’s suitability for action-hero duty. Those who caught the movie in theaters, maybe even on a double bill with Boiler Room, could clearly see into his future as a post-millennial Rambo. But few of the big Hollywood projects that followed better capitalized on his rugged, monosyllabic qualities. No wonder Diesel returned to the film’s treacherous star system, reprising the role in two sequels — the goofier, more expansive Chronicles of Riddick and the back-to-basics Riddick — even after he had moved on to more lucrative multi-picture engagements.
Boiler Room Prospecting Scene - Vin Diesel Closing
In retrospect, 2000 was as much a last hurrah as it was a highpoint for Vin Diesel, the actor, not the brand. A year later, he’d buckle in for the comparably low-key first entry in a series he’d eventually makeover into a multi-billion-dollar vanity project. There was really no turning back from the road Fast & Furious put him on. It’s been basically all intellectual-property bids since, as Diesel has balanced his cash cow franchise with attempts to develop new ones. You have to strain to see any real artistic ambition in any of the work he’s done since the day the multiplex served up double, clashing doses of his cowboy swagger. Besides a supporting role in Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, it’s been one star sleepwalk after another.
Maybe Diesel never had a character actor's range. As a performer, he mostly offers different shades of macho — brooding, sentimental, or arrogant as needed. But on one winter day at the start of a new century, he demonstrated that his particular steroidal charisma could be stretched a little, and applied to projects with wildly different aims. February 18 was a crossroads for this modern tough guy. He took the path to marquee immortality that Pitch Black opened up before him, while leaving us wondering how many Boiler Rooms he bypassed along the way.
Boiler Room and Pitch Black are both available to rent or purchase from the major digital services. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.