Movie: xXx - The Return of Xander Cage
Director: D J Caruso
Cast: Vin Diesel, Deepika Padukone, Tony Jaa
Rating: 1.5/5
I have a confession. I loved the first xXx movie, even if typing it out is a bloody pain. I even thought the second one, with Ice Cube and the whole White House takeover, was watchable. Given how my standards in Vin Diesel movies is considerably low, you have to understand how bad the third movie must have been for me to say that it plumbs the depths. Also, Deepika Padukone's voice and annoying accent do plenty to dent the effect of her generally ravishing looks. Even her Chennai Express dubbing seems like a gold standard compared to this hack job.
Despite having an expansive cast, the new xXx movie is a drag - a rehash of old 80's action movie plots and action sequences that attempt to be even more jaw-dropping than the ones in Fast and Furious 8. News Flash. They're not. After a point, the action gets so monotonous that you find yourself enjoying the background music (some amazing new age pop and hip hop, incidentally) more than the sounds of bullets whizzing around.
We were told that Xander Cage (Vin Diesel) was dead in the last movie. Turns out he wasn't. He's roaming the world skating, schmoozing and skewering around - trying to stay out of his handler Gibbons' (Samuel L Jackson) grubby NSA hands. A renegade group attacks a government facility and steals a super secret device, very originally named Pandora's Box. It can cause satellites to become missiles so it's bad news. Bad, bad news. Anyway, Gibbons dies, Xander cries and all hell breaks loose.
Possibly the only good thing about the film is that you get to see Vin Diesel wearing a fur skin coat again. There's something about a buff man in a big fur. Bit of nostalgia, that. Spoiler alert: There are cameos by Neymar and Ice Cube but they're so forgettable that it took a reminder from a friend for me to add this bit.
In the original xXx movie, Vin Diesel was a renegade, an action junkie, an anti-establishment man who regularly destroyed public property, flipped cops off and posted videos on YouTube of him jumping off dams. In this xXx movie, Vin Diesel plays the same guy - except, instead of doing most of the stuff that makes him 'him', everybody just talks about it. Reverentially. And that only gets exceedingly annoying when the writing is as poor as it is.
The self-aggrandizing of Xander Cage is possibly at its potent worst during his 'big entrance' - a ridiculous, drawn out, badly shot sequence where he pulls a battery out of a cell phone tower, jumps off, skateboards through a forest, all the way to the coast just to get a TV working for people to watch a football match. Not only is it badly shot, most fob the visual effects are so patchy and amateurish (especially a satellite meets plane crash at the end) that you wonder if the studio slashed the budget in an effort at damage control.
Verdict: You're better off watching the stuff that pops up when you Google xxx than this film. Really.