Hes starred in every entry since and will return once more for Fast & Furious 9. He passed on both 2 Fast 2 Furious and xXx 2 to work on other projects, but it was his return in 2009s Fast & Furious that boosted his career to a new level. Fast and furious on the surface, shallow and conventional beneath, Diesel’s bid to carve himself another billion-dollar franchise is off to a good start with this mainstream crowd-pleaser. Given Vin Diesels current franchise dominance, its hard to imagine a time he was reluctant to make sequels. Steve Jablonsky‘s ever-present, over-insistent orchestral score also grates on the nerves before long.

Less impressively, Eisner’s movie is clogged with cardboard characters, flat dialogue and a sluggish middle act that gets lost in too much fabricated witchy folklore. A couple of late plot twists also feel refreshingly left-field, even if they are shameless signposts for future sequels. In its favor, The Last Witch Hunter boasts some terrific production design and digital effects, notably the Witch Queen’s lair and a creature called the Sentinel, both nightmarish pagan constructions of shape-shifting wood and bone. The list The Last Witch Hunter cast includes Vin Diesel, Rose Leslie, Michael Caine, Elijah Wood and lafur Darri lafsson. Still, having such a wooden lead playing such a one-dimensional hero definitely makes it less appealing for casual movie goers. In fairness, these limitations are unlikely to deter the movie’s action-fan target demographic. In The Last Witch Hunter, he acts opposite an immobile corpse and a wooden tree monster, yet still somehow manages to be stiffer than both. But more recently he seems to have settled comfortably into Steven Segal mode, a walking bag of boiled ham whose expressive range barely extends beyond sleepy-eyed, guttural grunts. All smirk and bicep, he was once earmarked as the natural successor to Bruce Willis. The one truly impressive thing about Diesel’s acting skills is how he has achieved so much with so little.

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