Film Review – xXx: The Return of Xander Cage

January 19th, 2017 | POSTED BY Benjamin Nason

Because apparently the world was lacking in secret agents that do three-sixty tail-slides off foreign ambassador’s convoy tail-pipes, we now have a new xXx movie, xXx: The Return of Xander Cage. In case you don’t remember seven years ago (2005) there was a movie in which Ice Cube starred as a secret agent, Darius Stone, who does extreme sports type stuff and was recruited by Samuel L. Jackson to save the world with his unique skills. Well in case you don’t remember three years before that (2002) there was this other movie where Vin Diesel first played this extreme sports guy, Xander Cage, who did stuff like steal congressmen’s cars to drive them off bridges and parachute to safety while filming the whole thing for an internet show about sticking it to the man, or something.

And now here we are in 2017 and Samuel L. Jackson is still recruiting extreme sports stars like, Neymar when a satellite falls out of the sky and changes plans for Jackson’s Augustus Gibbons by apparently killing him dead. With no Gibbons and a device that can control any satellite orbiting earth, effectively turning it into a weapon, there’s only one man who can save the day, and that’s Riddick, I mean Xander Cage. After faking his death, Dominic Toretto, again, sorry, I mean Cage, is living somewhere exotic and skiing off television transmission towers and down hills to watch soccer games when he’s called back to duty by Gibbons’ replacement, Jane Marke (Toni Collette).

We get to rehash a sequence from the original xXx, where Cage proves his genius by recognizing a situation is actually fake and just a test for some unknown reason other than someone, probably script writer F. Scott Frazier, thought it would be cool to do. After that Cage is off to recover his fantastic fur coat that he sported in the original film. Seriously, this is a great fur coat. It’s huge and looks really warm, and Diesel sports it like he’s the proudest person in the world to be wearing that coat. It kind of makes you proud to be watching him. Anyway, the coat is short lived and soon this guy Xiang (Donnie Yen), a woman named Serena (Deepika Padukone) and Tony Jaa are breaking into this office building and stealing the device that controls satellites and it’s up to Cage to form a team and go after them.

Effectively, or not so effectively, this is basically a Fast and Furious knock-off with Diesel trying for that unified theory of acting where all his characters are essentially a fantasy, proto-version of himself. Unfortunately, this is not a Fast and Furious movie. Director D.J. Caruso treats the whole thing like a Saturday Morning Cartoon with pop-out info-bubbles that tell us minute and oh-so-funny quips about the characters they’re introducing. It’s cute. It also means that the action sequences, unless briefly watching Yen and Jaa do their martial arts mastery, are choppy, edited too quick with too unsteady, jerky camera movements and make the regrettable decision of having characters pose in cool positions while firing guns, like two women back-to-back as they cut down an anonymous wave of enemy attackers.

The biggest crime here is the decision to double down on terrible action movie clichés while rarely providing the over-the-top charisma an action film like this, like a Fast and Furious movie, would deliver. The flipside is like also with that other famed and never-ending action series, the main cast of characters are diverse and speak with their given accents, providing if nothing else, a fresh and refreshing aspect to something that’s working so hard at the tried and true; and failing at that. As mentioned, if this actually had some charisma and an attitude that was enjoyable, other short comings might not stand out so starkly.

Also, for a movie predicated on the combination of extreme sports and international intrigue there is very little in the way of extreme sports, especially in comparison to the other two movies in the series. One sequence finds Cage picking up a dirt bike and riding around as things blow up and bullets are shot at him, but aside from that and the opening scene, Cage is mostly talking about how awesome he is as opposed to be as awesome as he sounds. Physics is defied and mostly obeys the rules of Diesel as one scene finds a hole torn open in an airplane bathroom, but only sucks out those deemed worthy by Cage and of course never Cage himself.

If at any point you get confused as to what world this is all happening in, Toretto, again sorry, last time, Cage, talks about the importance of family and how X takes care of X. Because they are all a big family it’s totally cool they’re fighting against a rather unknown enemy who’s never fully explained, because who cares about the enemy? It’s about watching Becky (Nina Dobrev) drop a machine gun that unintentionally goes off and kills a couple bad guys, to which Becky exclaims how awesome all this killing is. Or how Cage just shows up to a commune of half-clad women and is soon amidst an orgy. Eh… when does The Fate of the Furious come out again?

D.J. Caruso, Deepika Padukone, Donnie Yen, F. Scott Frazier, Fast and Furious, Ice Cube, Neymar, Nina Dobrev, Paramount Pictures, Ruby Rose, Toni Collette, Tony Jaa, Vin Diesel, xXx, xXx: State of the Union