A Man Apart (2003)

A Man Apart arrives from 2003, a year when a vigilante thriller could still be a vigilante thriller without apology. F. Gary Gray directs Vin Diesel as Sean Vetter, a DEA agent whose wife is shot in a botched hit, and who then spends the remainder of the runtime working his way up a cartel's org chart with a grimace and a service pistol. The film is a revenge procedural, plain and simple. It opens with a drug deal, ends at a graveside, and in between offers shootouts, stakeouts, and one memorable interrogation involving a revolver and a single round. There is no thesis. There is no sermon. There is a man, a dead wife, and a list of people to visit.

Mr. Gray assembles a cast that reflects the Los Angeles of its setting without announcing the fact. Diesel, of mixed heritage, shares the screen with Larenz Tate as his lifelong friend and partner, and a range of Latino performers populate the DEA and cartel ranks with an ease that feels like casting, not commentary. The film does not pause to congratulate itself for this. A racial slur surfaces as a clue, deployed by a villain whose casual bigotry betrays a lie, and the moment passes without a lesson attached. Stacy Vetter exists chiefly to be mourned, which is a tired convention and not a feminist statement in any direction.

The picture's cultural footprint is faint. It carries no environmental appeal, no economic grievance, no interest in the body or the mind or the historical record. Instead it offers a B+ CinemaScore and a 10 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, a combination that tells you audiences wanted comfort and critics wanted something else. Mr. Gray has since called it his biggest regret. We can see why. It is competent, joyless, and entirely of its moment, which is to say a moment that has since passed.