I’ve said it a few times on The Movie Blog before, but I’ll repeat it again anyway. I’m not a Vin Diesel fan at all. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate Vin Diesel, actually he seems like a pretty bright guy… but I have yet to see him in ANY film where I though he did anything better than an “ok” performance. Nor have I even really enjoyed any of his films (and no… a small part in Saving Private Ryan does not make that one of “his films”). Just my opinion.
Anyway, it looks like in this new project, The Retriever, Vin is at it again to try to save the world from the evil yadda yadda yadda. Been there, done that. But it’s a formula that seems to work at the box office. The good folks over at Empire give us this:
The story apparently centres around a group of Russian terrorists (yawn) who get their grubby, democracy-hating hands on a Doomsday device abandoned at Chernobyl in the wake of the accident there. With nothing to lose, they don their radiation suits, retrieve it and threaten to use it to extinguish all life on Earth, unless their dreadful demands are met.
To me it just looks like we’re in for another horrible xXx or Fast and the Furious. But who knows. There are people out there who know a LOT more about film than I do who seem to think Vin Diesel has some untapped potential. I don’t see it… but perhaps they’re right and one of these days he’ll be in a film where it all just pops out like a 14 year old’s hard on who forgot to do up his fly. Why do I have my doubts that “The Retriever” will be that film?
