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You shook the dust off the tired James Bond spy films with their tuxedos and their gadgets and started a franchise that had muscle and force behind it. Yeah… So Chronicles of Riddick was lousy, but the video game was decent! You were better than good in that video game!

The Pacifier is another excruciating entry into the ‘atypical guy watches the unruly kids in a dysfunctional family’ genre, a genus of film that hasn’t made money since Uncle Buck flipped a huge pancake back in 1989. Yet for some reason, studios like Disney feel the need to chew this cud again and again.

If you’ve seen the preview, you know the plot. Diesel plays Shane Wolf (or was it Chaim Lowenstein? I can’t remember) a navy SEAL who blows up helicopters and beats up Serbians for a living. His new assignment is to protect five kids from an enemy that wants the secret invention designed by their assassinated father. Wolf finds himself contending with a teenage girl with attitude, a boy who dyes his hair blonde and keeps a Nazi armband in his locker, a weird girl scout, and a toddler and baby who together expel intestinal gasses and throw up a lot.

I will say this. Children under the age of 12 and teenagers who never set foot in a library might get some cheap thrills out of this refuse. During the preview I attended, every fart joke, vomit gag, and diaper changing scene met with a gaggle of prepubescent giggles. The adolescents particularly enjoyed a groin-biting duck that waddled in and out of frame intermittently throughout the film. In point of fact, any and all testicle crushing moments brought forth thunderous, high-pitched merriment.

Being an adult not charmed by flatulence or crappy diapers (well… maybe a little), my un-diverted mind attacked the plot holes of The Pacifier with the precision of a highly trained Spec Ops Team.

Why weren’t any of the children showing any signs of mourning? (The oldest child cries for about three seconds.)Why was an abusive assistant principal (Brad Garrett), who berates children in front of the sweet principal, not under any sort of investigation by DCFS? How can a Mini-van be driven like a monster truck while not suffering any dents or scrapes? Why doesn’t the family have any friends? Why doesn’t Vin Diesel have any friends? Who green-lighted this, and does he or she still have a job?

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that The Pacifier is written by Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant. These two make up part of the creative team behind Reno 911, one of the funniest television shows on the air. How can two authors create a show that is so vibrant while writing a film that is so tedious?

Why Vin Diesel turned down another XXX movie to make this trash is a mystery. The Pacifier is what action stars do when their careers are in the commode, not when they have merely stumbled a bit.

Let’s hope future projects are a little brighter for Diesel, because The Pacifier is a movie that the muscles from Brussels, Jean-Claude Van Damme, would have declined.

link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=11781&reviewer=396
originally posted: 03/05/05 00:21:19
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