Vin Diesel vs. The Rock
Battle of the Beefy Bald B-Movie Bad-Asses

Vin Diesel is an arrogant prick. He's the kind of guy who refuses to take off his shirt on film because he saves his guns for "Vin Diesel movies" (ones he directs). He's confident enough about his career that he opts out of sequels, to his own movies, that make decent money (like 2 Fast 2 Furious), but shows up for sequels, to his own movies, that are huge flops (like The Chronicles Of Riddick). He's the kind of person who thinks very highly of himself, and who takes himself very very seriously. He's not the kind of guy who makes poo jokes and gets bitten by ducks in G-rated Disney movies. And yet, The Pacifier is a fact. And a hard one to ignore, given its first-place opening weekend.

We should be delighted to see such an arrogant prick as Vin Diesel undone, clowning with diapers and packing his holster with juiceboxes (which seems like it should be a euphemism, but isn't). It's not like we've ever been his biggest fan; sure, voicing the title character in The Iron Giant will buy you a little credit with us, but eventually you've got to pay off that balance with another good movie or that credit's going to get maxed out. And yet, the fact of The Pacifier doesn't fill us with schadenfreude. It actually makes us a little sad. We never thought we'd miss the humorless, egomaniacal Vin Diesel we knew in days of yore, but we do, a little. At least, while being laughably deluded about his own worth as an artist, the old Vin Diesel wasn't painful to behold, unlike his fellow egomaniacal weirdo/semi-namesake Vincent Gallo. At least the old Vin Diesel stood for something, even if that something was misguided pretension. Vin Diesel 2005 -- the Vin Diesel of The Pacifier -- is a debased, degraded creature we must pity even as we despise him. He's Gollum. (If Gollum did a lot of bicep curls.)

The Pacifier allows Diesel to prove that he can open a movie and therefore deserves the hundred krillion dollars it will take for him to make his pet project, a Hannibal biopic. (Which, if it actually happens -- I mean, did Alexander teach us nothing? No one cares about the olden days, and no one wants to see short boobs in miniskirts talking all historic-like.) But more than that, The Pacifier is Diesel's Hail Mary pass -- an attempt, on his part, to convince us that there's more to him than cranky glowering. If we can see that he's able to make it through a fizzy family comedy without dismembering, with his bare hands, any of the kids he's been tasked to protect, then maybe we'll accept him if the next movie he wants to do is a romantic comedy opposite, like, Téa Leoni. The reason the whole enterprise reeks of desperation, though, is because Diesel is desperate -- desperate to prove that he hasn't been usurped by The Rock.

Because we love The Rock as much as, if not more than, we hate Diesel, and Diesel knows it. He knows that The Rock is so eager to break into films that he'll do whatever B-movie claptrap crosses his agent's desk. Walking Tall remake? You bet! Movie versions of the videogames Spy Hunter and Doom? Absolutely! Live-action adaptation of the long-forgotten cult-unhit Johnny Bravo? Why, we don't see why not. Diesel -- just as beefy, bald, and multiracial as The Rock, and with a slightly less silly name (although there's still time for him to change it to "The Diesel") -- has established a reputation for being both prickly and finicky, but not The Rock! The Rock will show up for work every day with a huge smile on his face. The Rock will buzz through his scenes with discipline and take direction without the slightest whiff of ego. The Rock will barely react when you punk him by blowing up his trailer; that's just how mellow he is. And when it's all over, The Rock will go on every talk show you want him to and talk up the movie like he has no idea it sucks, possibly because he doesn't know it does. The Rock will effuse about John Travolta -- John Travolta! -- as though making an Elmore Leonard sequel with Bloatzilla is tantamount to taking a master class from Uta Hagen. The Rock will grin in a way that makes your knees melt, and when he shakes your hand with his gigantic paw, you will feel like a dainty little thing. You may blush.

Vin Diesel in The Pacifier may have bested The Rock in Be Cool in their competing opening weekends, but we lay that failure at John Travolta's feet. True, The Rock has yet to make a really great movie of the sort we'd want to see again and again, but that's also true of Diesel. (As we said: we don't count The Iron Giant anymore.) At least The Rock makes movies that he wants to be good, and he is so charismatic and likeable that he can even make tripe like The Rundown an enjoyable, if not especially thinky, 104 minutes. Whereas Vin Diesel is always faintly disgusted by whatever he's made to do on film, and as a result, so are we.

Advantage: The Rock