One bad goody

A man apart was made before xXx turned Vin Diesel into an international big-hitter. But you can see how he was already heading that way. It is a film in the new "extreme" style of violence whose exponents have each to be beastlier, more brutal and nihilistic to compete for box-office attention.

Had our censors refused to pass this sample of social pornography, I wouldn't have blamed them: I shall blame them if they let the trickle it currently represents turn into an overwhelming torrent at a time when society outside the cinema desperately needs to feel that its fears are being addressed, not exploited.

Like Cradle 2 the Grave last week, A Man Apart has a hero whom you can barely tell apart from the perpetrators. He is as brutal as they are. He doesn't confuse justice with lawlessness; he simply makes no distinction between the two. And as for the value of human life, it is just throw-away effects stuff: one minute there, then dismembered for ever with the roar of the Uzi or Magnum, and no tears shed.

When the police chief says to the stressed-out Vin, a DEA undercover operative, "You need time to grieve", it's the phoniest line in a plot that conflates a drugs war with a widower's vengeance and gets the maximum amount of blood-spilling, broken bodies and pornographic slaughter out of both.

Its proponents are either African-Americans or half-caste Mexicans. Its sole illustration of civic virtue is to show how bonding with his fellow blacks in South Central LA equips a guy like Vin to scorn police rules and break international law when the DEA Swat squad illegally crosses the border to pump lead into Tijuana's biggest drugs cartel and then prematurely crows about closing the pipeline to the US ("the greatest drugs-consuming nation on earth").

End justifies means: like Iraq, man. But a new kingpin called Diablo takes over the cocaine trade and the war goes on. Need I draw the moral closer to the Middle East? Not that F Gary Gray conceived this bloodletter with a view to equipping stay-home Americans with an easily grasped lesson in geopolitics.

But it is there, if you care to see it, in the film's contemptuous disregard for the rule of law and value of life. When his wife is slain by the new cartel, Vin's cop visits her grave and then slumps into temporary mourning on the sundeck of the Malibu beach home that he is unlikely to have been able to pay for from his policeman's wage packet.

Duty and thirst for vengeance soon return him to the fray, to put the heat on a series of colourful bits of low-life and a few who enjoy high-life, like the venomous owner of a Beverly Hills tanning parlour ( Timothy Olyphant) who is a one-man product placement for Armani, Gucci, Ray-Ban and Porsche.

But A Man Apart makes its consumers' pitch to the underclass of blue-collar movie-goers who want a non-stop, roller-coaster death ride without having to do too much heavy thinking between the shoot-outs.

These are Vin Diesel's constituents. Some 15 years ago, their fathers, whooping at Rambo blowing people away, were Sylvester Stallone's. All that has changed is that the pace and volume of the violence that Vin suffers and inflicts on others have got bigger, louder, bloodier.