Here’s a breakdown of the Fast & Furious star’s latest Vinity project.
Scott Garfield / Summit
Some actors who've been part of long-running franchises long to break out and do something different — indies, romantic comedies, personal films.
Not Vin Diesel.
When Diesel isn't jumping cars through skyscrapers, he just wants to fight mud demons on an alien planet and ride elephants over the Pyrenees. Diesel's passion projects aim to be even more grandiose than the Fast & Furious series that secured his status as a household name.
His latest, The Last Witch Hunter, is as untrammeled a combination of fantasy geeking-out and ego-driven muscle movie as you'll find in theaters this year.
It is terrible. It is fabulously entertaining. It is the most Vin Diesel project of all time. And here's why:
1. It starts off with Vin Diesel as a Viking named Kaulder.
Scott Garfield / Summit
Theoretically, the film begins in the Middle Ages, since by the time it skips to the present day, Diesel's character's Kaulder has been in the witch-hunting biz for 800 years. But his look in the beginning is pure Viking, or more accurately like Diesel watched Vikings on the History Channel and decided he wanted in on that sweet undercut action.
Is there something fundamentally funny about the site of the perpetually bald Diesel with hair? Of course — it was the best unspoken joke in Sidney Lumet's underappreciated Find Me Guilty. And yet Diesel wears the flowing locks and beard pigtails with such evident enjoyment as he and his pals in the vague past trek to a witch tree and down into a witch hole to fight the Witch Queen (Julie Engelbrecht), as if trying to make a point that his macho star wattage can't be dimmed by the covering up of his shiny pate.