By Tricia Olszewski
The sight of Vin Diesel covered in crap after crawling through a sewer is not as satisfying as one might think—which means there’s no good reason for The Pacifier to exist. Brought to us by Bringing Down the House director Adam Shankman and Taxi writers Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, the film is a clear ripoff of bruiser-turned-babysitter flicks such as Mr. Nanny and Kindergarten Cop—and exactly the kind of kids’ flick that should have self-respecting parents just saying no. No more fart jokes. No more Home Alone–style pratfalls. And for God’s sake, no more guns and explosions.
Regardless of what you think about the XXX star’s head-scratching attempt at comedy, when The Pacifier opens, it actually seems like a Vin Diesel movie. Diesel plays Shane, a Navy SEAL involved in some anti-Serbian dealings that leave a few ships blown up and several men dead. (Having family fun yet?) Shane takes a bullet himself but after a short recovery is given another mission: to protect the brood of a professor who was killed on Shane’s watch after designing a computer program some bad guys now want. Naturally, when Mom (Faith Ford) needs to leave to settle dead-daddy business and Helga the Haggish Housekeeper (Carol Kane!) decides to quit, child-hating Shane is stuck taking care of the five darlings, who range from poopy infant to pissy teenager.
Surprisingly, Shane is both less cartoonish and less convincing than the kids, with Diesel coming off as neither a hardened badass at the beginning nor—spoiler alert!—a lovable lout at the end. And to be fair, just because the excrement bit is an embarrassing failure doesn’t mean that it’s not mildly amusing when a school official tells our hero, “Wow, looks like you’ve got a pair of legs coming out of your shoulders!” Or when Shane refutes a girl’s comment about his voluptuousness by saying, “They’re not boobs.” And when Diesel sings a toddler to sleep with a song that begins, “When you think you are low, lower than the floor”? Now that’s funny because it’s true.