I blame Timothy Dalton. Yeah, I know the James Bond franchise started tailing badly by the end of Roger Moore’s reign, but it wasn’t until Timothy Dalton that normal people started saying, “Hey, maybe I can make a Bond film, too!” It took a while, but now there are several Bond-type franchises with a very low bar set at the Dalton threshold. And with the Trump-like confidence that he can vault that row of metaphorical matchbooks, Vin Diesel revives his titular Bond-like, X-gamer, pimp super-spy in xXx: Return of Xander Cage.
Confident doesn’t begin to describe Diesel here. I feel like this is Vin Diesel playing Vin Diesel. You have to retreat to Moore, Trump, or perhaps the animated Sterling Archer to find a man more satisfied with himself. Humility is a lost art. Ironically, Cage is supposed to be “lying low,” having faked his death years earlier. His version of lying low is cliff-diving off a radio tower and landing on a jungle mountain, skiing the corrugated roofs down to a bus stop where leg three of this bizarre Hispanic triathlon involves skateboarding through moving vehicles on snakelike roadways. All this for what? To steal the soccer telecast for the local townsfolk. Extreme cable piracy! Woohoo!
Hard to believe, I know, but somehow the American intelligence was able to piece together the clues that agent xXx wasn’t quite dead after all. Turns out, they need a job done. Just days earlier, the CIA was holding a top secret security-of-the-world meeting in a smartly-chosen glass-roofed penthouse; luckily, the joint chumps brought along an easily-thieved MacGuffin, a kindle capable of bringing down satellites from space. After one such dastardly coup fells a café occupied by Samuel L. Jackson, the Nick Fury of the xXx program, desperate brass search their souls to circumvent terrorism, asking the key question, “where will the people of Los Angeles be able to find another diner?”
Now before I can but complain about reel II, Toni Collette has sent Xander Cage to track down Donnie Yen and retrieve the MacGuffin in absolutely no uncertain or mundane terms. “Seriously, xXx, if it doesn’t involve motorcycle jet skis, parachutes, kung-fu atop moving vehicles or grenade roulette, don’t bother; we’ll get him ourselves.”
Idiot plot doesn’t begin to describe xXx: return of Xander Cage. Of stellar note is the inevitable “how can we find him?” scene while immediately surrounded by roughly a hectare of technology. I don’t remember how the actual dialogue for the moment went, but mine works just as well: “Did anyone try saying something glib and pushing three buttons at random? No?” (Three seconds later) “Turns out he’s in Detroit.”
The good news is that while the plot is asinine; the characters, while oft comic, are not. Donnie Yen is Ip Man for good reason. Other standouts include Ruby Rose as the lion-hunters hunter, Tony Jaa as the cirque du soleil villain and Rory McCann as the “just one more crash, pleeeeeeeease” sociopath. The problem in a script with fun characters and bad plot is that eventually you want everybody to be a good guy, which
means alliances and rivalries change every scene as required. Motivation becomes as fleeting as the silly terrorist threat in the film.
Perhaps I should watch my words here with regards to terrorism; yes, this plot is stupid to me, but there’s no shortage of voters out there who will, quite clearly, believe anything. I mean, seriously, any American who can be talked into the idea that foreign terrorists are a bigger threat than availability of firearms to your average Uncle Sam and Aunt Samantha is capable of being talked into pretty much any alternative facts there are … so long as they end in making bad choices. And, sure, this film caters to a certain conspiracy-hungry fear voter: there is neither a logical nor credible massive threat, the villain changes constantly depending on mood; yet, the important part is THE UNITED STATES IS IN TROUBLE! So get in there with plenty of guns and violence and hints of objectified sex … but don’t show any of the latter – that might be offensive.
Honestly – a film with “XXX” in the title yet contains no sex? As far as I’m concerned, that’s criminal behavior.
An embodiment of the verb “to revel”
Xander Cage is one thrill-seeking devil
Through speed of life fast
His ability unsurpassed
Is taking smug to the next level
Rated PG-13, 107 Minutes
D: D.J. Caruso
W: F. Scott Frazier
Genre: “I thought of a stunt; let’s write a plot around it.”
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Diesel ingénues
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Actual intelligence officers
