Turns out when you take Vin Diesel out from behind the steering wheel, he’s still rocking cruise control. His latest starring vehicle, The Last Witch Hunter, pays homage to the muscle-bound actor’s IRL passion for D&D. No, not designated driving but Dungeons and Dragons (the actor has openly express his passion for the tabletop role-playing game). Like a faltering dungeon master, Diesel is as one-dimensional and underwhelming as a bag of old Cheetos. Playing a Norseman destined to keep the peace between witches and the human race, Diesel does nothing to differentiate this performance from any of his other recent ones, and how could he? The man is as wooden as Groot, as mechanical as the Iron Giant, as audibly indecipherable as Dominic Toretto’s meat and potatoes growl-slur. It seems you can take the Dom out of the movie but you can’t take the Dom out of Vin Diesel.

I hesitate to move onto the other parts of the “film” just yet because this is first and foremost yet another bungled attempt to give Diesel his own franchise and we’ve got to deconstruct the fascinating bunt that is this semi-annual occurrence. Vin Diesel, for all his efforts, has not touched a successful franchise outside of the Fast world. Even when studios whip up pictures of the Diesel variety (2013’s hasty Riddick, the mega-flop Babylon A.D., the upcoming xXx: The Return of Xander Cage), it seems that big business squares up their checkbooks and banks on losing money for some obscure tax reasons. Anyone with even a hint of prudence could uncover that outside of Fast (and now Marvel), Diesel movies lose dough. That his latest film is a blunder will surprise no-one. It is however surprising that anyone was willing to bankroll it in the first place.

You see, Vin Diesel is an acquired taste, like capers or motor oil, that only works in the context of other projects but is pungent, unappealing and coarse on its own. Have you ever tried capers plain? They’re disgusting without cream cheese, lox, dill and a bagel. Diesel needs his cream cheese, lox, dill and a bagel. You don’t serve Diesel without a palatable aperitif to soften the blow. You hide him in a bed of better flavors – like by putting him in the shadow of The Rock or having him utter simple, often one-word phrases – so that his stoic, strongman act is a jocular breathe of fresh air. When Diesel fumes are all you’re able to breathe, the result is stifling. Almost suffocating. Like sitting in your garage with the car running.

Onto the film at hand, The Last Witch Hunter actually starts out on promising footing. A band of witch hunters circa 1200 rally around a massive tangle of a tree – one sure to remind the more N64-friendly of the bunch of an evil Deku Tree. The dark Pagean visuals pop and there’s a nice juxtaposition of practical sets and CG work. For a fleeting moment, there is an air of hope to the picture, soon to be squashed by narrative insolence and visual insulin.

Inside that burgeoning tree, a malevolent Witch Queen casts black magic spell, sending plague flies out to blanket the world with sicknesses of unspeakable effect. For you see, the Black Death of the Middle Ages (responsible for killing an estimated 100-200 million people) was the result of this one very bad witchy egg. Vin Diesel and Co. aim to lob off her limbs and put the pointy end of their swords through her heart and thereby save the day.

That first sequence is appropriately silly but it gets the tone right in a way that the rest of the film fails to do. It also features Diesel with a Viking ‘do, a braided, bedazzled beard and not talking a lot. He looks like a PO’ed Tolkien dwarf and that’s a major point in my book. Practical effects sub in for the CG work that later dominates the film and the Witch Queen in question is suitable grotesque – a wholly unnatural snarl of flesh and nature that would fit right into a Sam Raimi film – and whatever genius befit Diesel with a flaming sword actually understand the right level of stupid badassness that a movie named The Last Witch Hunter needed. As he strikes down that malignant Witch Queen, she curses Diesel’s Kaulder to live forever. His newfound permanence is allegedly a curse cuz his wife and daughter died of plague and now he’ll be sad and lonely and stuff. #bummer

Alas, these historic times turn to modern day and Diesel is back to the shiny-domed caricature we know so well. For a movie that tries to frame his immortality as a curse, Kaulder is cheery as a cherry. His first scene shared with Michael Caine – the 75th Deacon sworn to aid the everlasting witch hunter in his quest for Earthly balance – has him grinning like a jackal. In that Central Park high-rise, churning comely flight attendants in and out of his pad as if it were equipped with an actual resolving door, life without end seems positively dope. #score

When a substandard plot to resurrect the dark magic of ancient times comes into play, the rest of the film is history. Dumb, dumb history. That it took three people – Cory Goodman, Mat Sazama and Burk Sharpless – to craft this purely idiotic script is astounding. Their cunningly tongue-tied arrangement of words is supposed to convey a sense of mythology but ends up explaining everything into a vapid pool of stupidity. Their collective work truly is a blight the size of a harvest moon. There is no nuance, no characterization, no showing. Just tell, tell, tell. It’s pure exposition to the point where each character must not only state their motivation and purpose but they often must introduce themselves as well. It’s Bond Villain-ing taken up to the nth degree of dopiness. I’m pretty sure “I am Balthazar, harbinger of the Great Witch Queen and I have come to forsake you Witch Hunter” was uttered at one point. The dialogue is somewhere between a badly written video game and a WWE showdown. That is to say, it’s grade F material.

With a script this bad, the characters don’t stand much of a chance of being anything other than flat stand-ins and flat stand-ins they are. Game of Thrones alum Rose Leslie does what she can with her character Chloe, a potion-bar-owning witch who eventually aligns with Kaulder, but there is nothing to that character and the eventual romance that strikes up between her and our mumbling hero is borderline disastrous. Their chemistry is remedial. The spark only visible on the invisible spectrum. Michael Caine is easily the most entertaining of the bunch – even when relegated to the smallest of supporting roles – while Elijah Wood continues to pound home the fact that he a.) can’t seem to pick a project for his life, and b.) isn’t really very much of an actor. I mean, his lines are unenviable but the kid just can’t hack it.

Pretty much the whole kit and caboodle that is the The Last Witch Hunter is bad, almost irreconcilably so. Obviously there is demand for these kind of demonic action-fantasy films (look at the ceaseless continuation of the Resident Evil franchise) but director Breck Eisner (The Crazies) and Vin Diesel can’t figure out how to make the formula work in their favor. Rather, they feel constrained by it, punished even. Weighing in at 106 minutes, the film is about 100 minutes too long and you feel the strain kick in almost immediately after the prologue concludes. So strap in ladies and gentlemen because this is one long, rocky ride.

CONCLUSION: As bad as you might expect, ‘The Last Witch Hunter’ proudly displays Vin Diesel’s inability to act in an overlong CG-heavy shower of visual senselessness and narrative apathy.