A Man Apart review by John
I never made the connection between this movie and the steven seagal movie hard to kill. An interesting aside is that apparently steve is the first foreigner to own and operate an Aikido dojo in Japan(found that out looking up the name of that seagal movie). Getting back to more interesting topics: perhaps i just take a trip to my own little happy place when i watch movies and try to pick them apart based on their own lack of merit than immediately discounting them as a cheap rip off from the get go. At any rate this is the story that i'm going with. As far as the stories being similar, well, they are. Can't really get around that; however, execution is different, and even better Seagal isnt in this one.The movie starts with Sean Vetter and his group of american drug enforcement types getting ready to arrest a known drug king pin in Mexico. Right off the bat Vetter starts playing by his own rules by disregarding a direct order before the raid even begins. Of course this is to show that the hero has a bad streak and possibly that he is single-minded in that completion of the mission is the only important part and the rest is just details. Naturally Vetter nabs the bad guy after a fairly uneventful chase scene that had some good close combat action at the conclusion of the chase.
So of course we move on to the 'you-did-a-really-good-thing-and-we-are-all-proud-of-you' celebration section of the movie. Luckily this is nearly as short as this paragraph about it.
Getting to the basic plot, Vetter's wife is shot and killed after an assassination atempt and just like in hard to kill Vetter is bed ridden in a hospital for some time even though he didnt appear to be that badly injured by hollywood standards. Upon awakening he learns that his wife has been killed and so he becomes 'a man apart'. And now Vetter has another goal: to find and extact vengance on the people responsible for leaving him apart from his wife.
Using his friends and his street skillz(which is narrated to the audience so that you will know, and make no mistake, this dude really is a bad ass) he begins his quest. In this journey he uses his friends and DEA buddies to basically do what ever it takes to track down the person responsible for his wife's death. And essentially that is what Vetter does. He abuses criminals and suspected criminals, he passes himself off as a drug distributor all in an effort to find diablo who, he has been told, is the responsible party. And at the end there is a pretty good plot twist. But this is still a hollywood movie so of course there needs to be the second ending where Vetter has put his vengence aside and has made piece with his loss.
Personally, the ending should have remained on the personal torment level. I think a good job was done to convey that this guy was consumed by his loss. There is a couple of scenes where Vetter is sitting outside his house with nothing to do but loath himself because he cant even sleep in his own bed because his whole house is a crime scene. And as mentioned previously his dealings with anyone who can give him information would leave his as something less than reputable. All in all the fight scenes are good. The comedy is there in bits, though not by Vin of course, his character is tormented remember? If the movie was ended on a down note like the rest of the movie played out I probably would have been compelled to give this one an 8, or maybe even a 9.
7 out of 10 Jackasses blog comments powered by Disqus
