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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

‘Pacifier’ sucks


Vin Diesel plays a Manny ... errr male nanny in the less-than- stellar
Roger Moore Orlando Sentinel

Vin Diesel stretches to do his “Kindergarten Cop” turn in “The Pacifier,” a feeble Disney comedy that presents the bullet-headed action star as a babysitter.

Hear Vin bark out orders. See Vin kicking some South Korean and Serbian behinds.

Watch Vin direct “The Sound of Music.”

Smell Vin changing diapers. Well, watch him smell them.

Diesel is a SEAL charged with looking after the kids of a murdered security expert whose wife (Faith Ford) has gone to Zurich to try and retrieve the family’s super-secret missile launch-code encrypting program from a bank vault.

Got all that?

A guy with the ethos of “Leave no man behind” now must leave no child behind in a marathon nanny- mission.

“What this family needs is some discipline.”

There’s a troubled teen more at home on the stage than on the wrestling mat, a tarty daughter about to fall in with the wrong guy, a cookie-obsessed “Firefly Girl,” middle child, a toddler who needs a special dance performed for him before he’ll go to sleep and an infant given to projectile vomiting.

Oh, and ninjas busting in and trying to steal the encryption gadget from the house.

But Lt. Shane Wolf is on task.

“There’s my way. And no highway option.” No, it doesn’t rhyme. And it’s not funny.

The director of “Bringing Down the House” and the writer and co-creator of “Reno 911!” fail to find anything funny outside of the diaper pail.

Wolf drives like a commando, gives orders like a drill sergeant and takes care of business when fisticuffs are called for.

Much like Diesel himself.

Some actors are at a loss when there’s no fight to be choreographed, no gun to be wielded, no plane to be leapt from. Stallone was one. Diesel is another. Take away his sunglasses, and he’s just another musclehead enduring “Don’t you have a bra?” jokes about his too-manly chest.

If only those were funnier.