A BROODING VIN LACKS USUAL VIGOR.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

FOR A MOVIE that was made two years ago and has been accruing ``troubled'' interest ever sense, it turns out that ``A Man Apart'' is a not-half-bad entry in the overworked vengeful cop field.

But you can also see why the distributor felt there was a problem. For some inexplicable reason, director F. Gary Gray (``Friday,'' ``The Negotiator'') decided to make this a performance-based piece.

The film stars Vin Diesel. You understand the situation.

Diesel plays Sean Vetter, who with his homeboy pal Demetrius Hicks (Larenz Tate) operates the most successful DEA squad in SoCal. Ex- gangbangers themselves, they successfully take down an elusive Mexican drug cartel kingpin, Geno Silva's Lucero, whom officials on both sides of the border have been after for years.

But with Lucero gone, an exponentially more ruthless and mysterious entity known only as Diablo (this film's original title, by the way) sets about violently taking over Lucero's operation and its many stateside offshoots. For some reason, this requires putting a hit on Vetter at his how-can-a-straight-cop-afford-it beachfront home. Vetter survives the attack. His adoring wife, Stacy (Jacqueline Obradors), does not.

From then on, Vetter and some buddies - with the advice, strangely enough, of the imprisoned Lucero - go outside official channels to track down this Diablo. This leads to some pretty interesting encounters, such as a comic/grotesque massacre at a South Central dealer's house and a shoot-out in a San Pedro parking lot that gets awfully out-of-hand. There is also harassment of a certain smart aleck called Hollywood Jack (Timothy Olyphant) and the traditional turning-in-of-the-badge sequence. None of this makes the whole Who Is Diablo? business any clearer.

Through it all, Vetter exhibits anger management difficulties whenever anything reminds him of his lost love. This is good, since otherwise Diesel seems to be going for an existential, brooding depth-of-character effect that, in the presentation, gets real boring real fast.

On the bright side, ironically, is the darkly evocative cinematography of Clint Eastwood's favorite shooter, Jack L. Green. And it should be said that ``A Man Apart's'' script, credited to the first-timer team of Christian Gudegast and Paul T. Scheuring, has more intelligent writing to it than most films of this ilk usually manage.

But the question remains: Does the genre benefit from such niceties, or do they just slow the action down?

A MAN APART - Two and one half stars

(R: violence, nudity, drugs, language)

Starring: Vin Diesel, Larenz Tate, Timothy Olyphant, Geno Silva.

Director: F. Gary Gray.

Running time: 1 hr. 49 min.

Playing: Wide release.

In a nutshell: Vin Diesel is the man. Vengeful DEA agent is the part. You've seen it before, often done better but certainly done worse.

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Vin Diesel plays a narcotics officer whose wife (Jacqueline Obradors) becomes a target of his enemies in ``A Man Apart.''