Review: ‘xXx: Return of Xander Cage’

Kids will know him as Groot, maybe even as an iron giant (and, god help us, The Pacifier), but to adults Vin Diesel is identifiable by his action movies. Namely, the Fast and the Furious series where he sports his trademark shaved head and muscular physique. Sort of like Dwayne Johnson – only smaller. After playing the antihero Riddick in the cult hit Pitch Black, which spawned a series of films, and Dominic Toretto in The Fast and the Furious, a 2001 release which is about to hit its eighth installment in 2017, he decided to be a cosplay version of James Bond, if James Bond competed in the X-Games.

In a short span, Diesel became an accidental leading action hero of various properties, some which worked (pretty much those already stated), some that didn’t (The Last Witch Hunter), and all of which are pretty stupid. They are the type of action movies that are out to prove just how magical and transcendent movies can actually be. Oh, who am I kidding; Diesel’s action movies defy most logic and physics and yet I am unabashedly amused by them.

Fifteen years after playing Xander Cage in the original xXx, Vin Diesel returns (hence the title), and it is pretty much the last few Fast and Furious films but with a different supporting cast. Xander Cage is like the Jeff Spicoli of action heroes. Trading in muscle cars for a skateboard, some tasty waves, tactical body armor, and one-liners that would make Roger Moore almost choke on his shaken martini, Diesel is amped up to reprise the role of Xander again. This thrill junkie is all about topping himself with one outrageous stunt after another. Which is befitting for a twentysomething with a no fear attitude, but Diesel is in his late forties and about to be the big 5-0.

When Xander is pulled out of hiding in the Dominican Republic – so much for his supposed death – he’s reluctant to save the world again. Then he hears the sales pitch: Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson) is dead; killed by a fallen satellite in splendid WTF fashion. Gibbons started the xXx program for the National Security Agency, scouting assets the same way a sports team would scout athletes. Xander was his best recruit. In real time, Xander’s enlistment was in a sudden, post 9/11 world, where surveillance was a key piece on global terrorism. Now the game has changed. Patriots are nonexistent. You’re either a rebel or a tyrant. This is just one of the potent quotables Xander directs to NSA chief Jane Marke (a sleepwalking Toni Collete). The interactions between the two are borderline insufferable.

She wants him to retrieve a hacking device known as Pandora’s Box, which has been stolen by an expert team of shadow operatives for their own purposes. Wiping out a certain world leader about to take office, perhaps? Maybe offer it up in a trade for copies of Dogtown and Z-Boys or tickets to Coachella. The possibilities are endless.

Literally jettisoning the team of elite soldiers Marke has paired him with out a carrier plane, Xander rifles through his top five as if he were assembling his own Impossible Missions Force team: a group of social misanthropes who missed the bus to the Vans Warped Tour by like a decade. Clandestine skills and tactics are not the menu, but personality sure is. We have Tennyson Torch (Rory McCann), a human crash test dummy with nearly 200 performed stunt crashes; Nicks (Kris Wu), who is just fun to be around (that’s what his on-screen freeze frame dossier reads); Adele Wolff (Ruby Rose), a skilled sniper who hates animal poachers. Adele’s pithy like Deadpool’s Negasonic Teenage Warhead only without the whole Sinéad skinhead thing happening. Nina Dobrev plays a research analyst who is in awe of Xander’s physique and is not bashful about sharing her safe word with him.

Kumquat.

The same year xXx was released in theaters director D.J. Caruso made The Salton Sea starring Val Kilmer. A nice slice of neo-noir with Kilmer entering an underworld inhabited by thugs, junkies, and a dealer named Pooh-Bear. Caruso is a journeyman filmmaker having given us Disturbia, which is Hitchcock’s Rear Window with a young adult spin, and the movies Eagle Eye and I Am Four. As the third one to enter the director’s chair in the xXx franchise, following Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious) and Lee Tamahori (James Bond’s Die Another Day), Caruso doesn’t shoot in a singular style. This may explain why the pic required a pair of editors making chop-socky to the footage on the cutting room floor.

Each set piece apes the one before going for style points and involves skiing and skateboarding, waterskiing on dirt bikes, and Donnie Yen kicking all sorts of ass. The force may be with him, but he’s a force to be reckoned with! How was this not one of the movie’s tag lines?

Relentless action that involves jumping over cars and running into cars, and a plummeting airplane with zero gravity fighting intercut with a Call of Duty battle scene in a Detroit warehouse, it’s almost too much. At least our hero adheres to a simple three-point rule when going about his business: kick some ass, get the girl, and try to look dope while doing it.

xXx: Return of Xander Cage is fundamentally dumb and narratively dense yet perfectly acceptable junk food cinema. Those who don’t mind cavities are sure to have a fun time.

Score: 7/10

Director: D.J. Caruso
Writer: F. Scott Frazier (based on characters created by Rich Wilkes)
Cast: Vin Diesel, Donnie Yen, Deepika Padukone, Samuel L. Jackson, Toni Collette
Rating: PG-13 (for extended sequences of gunplay and violent action, and for sexual material and language)
Running Time: 107 minutes