Okay, so here's why I don't like Vin Diesel. At first I just kind of passed off my aversion to him as jealousy of the machismo variety as fems around me swooned, but something else was bugging me. That is, that the characters that he plays are a) a false sort of anti-hero (ie, a popularized kind that isn't a true anti-hero but only labeled as such because he's a "bad guy doing good things") and b) don't have a real flaw or internal struggle to give them any depth. What I mean by that is the flaw they have is either that (to reiterate) they're "bad guys doing good things" or they're kind of dumb. As a counter-example, the Rock (who is much more charismatic, I might add, and better trained to boot) played a character in The Rundown who carried the weight of some apparently incredibly painful experience with him, which is never explicitly defined, and yet it still managed to play a significant role in the story.

And to weigh in on The Prisoner of Azkaban, it had very shiny special effects. It gets a cookie. Oh, and I think they snuck in a painting of Cthulu during one of the moving stairway shots.