xXx: Return of Xander Cage Review

4 out of 10

Cast:

Vin Diesel as Xander Cage / xXx

Donnie Yen as Xiang

Deepika Padukone as Serena Unger

Kris Wu as Harvard “Nicks” Zhou

Ruby Rose as Adele Wolff

Tony Jaa as Talon

Nina Dobrev as Rebecca “Becky” Clearidge

Samuel L. Jackson as NSA Agent Augustus Eugene Gibbons

Toni Collette as Jane Marke

Nicky Jam as Lazarus

Rory McCann as Tennyson “The Torch”

Al Sapienza as CIA Director

Michael Bisping as Hawk

Ariadna Gutiérrez as Gina Roff

Hermione Corfield as Ainsley

Tony Gonzalez as Paul Donovan

Ice Cube as Darius Stone

Directed by D.J. Caruso

xXx: Return of Xander Cage Review:

There is nothing wrong with ridiculous, over-the-top action films which pile impossibility atop impossibility and all with a wink and a smile. It’s a milieu which includes some of the most gloriously silly, and thoroughly entertaining films of all time. Jason Statham’s career is basically built on the idea, minus all of the winking and smiling. The ubiquity of them, and the way their goofiness is not only accepted but frequently the reason they are loved, can make it seem easy to make one – just put a bunch of macho people on screen trying to out macho one another and stand back. It is not that easy, however, as xXx: Return of Xander Cage amply demonstrates every moment it is on screen. xXx: Return of Xander Cage is boring and silly, or silly and boring, but never, ever entertaining no matter how hard it tries and it tries very, very hard.

Picking up a decade or so after the last film, the XXX extreme spy group masterminded by NSA honcho Gibbons (Jackson) is reactivated when a vaguely dangerous black box, which causes satellites to fall out of orbit and crash into cities, gets used to do what it was made for. Original XXX Xander Cage (Diesel) is brought back from retirement after faking his death (in a DVD-only special feature so you may be forgiven for missing that detail) to find said box and puts together a team of new XXXers [XXX-ites?] to rob the robbers. When their adversaries, led by cocky martial arts master Xiang (Yen) turn out to also be XXX with an agenda of their own, Cage and his cohorts must decide who they can really trust.

It’s hard to believe that a film with Vin Diesel, Donnie Yen and Tony Jaa beating people up while Nina Dobrev talks about her sex swing could be as boring as xXx: Return of Xander Cage is. No matter how many girls in bikinis or explosions are thrown up on screen, every moment is tainted with the smell of desperation. The rule of cool rules all, but the rule of cool requires you to actually care about what people are getting up to on screen and we’re never given a reason to. All of the characters are basically the same 13-year-old boy, even the girls. Director D.J. Caruso (Eagle Eye) has always had a decent eye for tension and action scenes but has had terrible luck with material and xXx: Return of Xander Cage is unfortunately no exception.

The screenplay by F. Scott Frazier, like many of its type, wants to be for young people and ends up being the middle-age man’s idea of what young people want from an action hero. It’s a problem which is even more notable when it is placed on the shoulders of a pair of (about) 50-year-old men who must act half their age. The fact that those men are Vin Diesel and Donnie Yen helps, giving the film a tremendous amount of screen charisma to play off of, but it doesn’t quite disguise how long in the tooth they are getting for this kind of idea. If xXx: Return of Xander Cage does nothing more than get Yen a headline role in a big studio film, it will have been a success. The sequences focusing on Yen in particular give glimmers of hope that a better movie is right around the corner, especially once he and Diesel begin chasing one another on foot above and then among and even beneath moving car traffic is when it actually does reach the level of over-the-top ridiculousness it’s aiming for. The rest of the time it hits a different level, one filled with ridiculous macho pronouncements and Toni Collette’s unending death glare.

Above anything else there seems to be an unending desire to transform xXx: Return of Xander Cage into a Fast & Furious type franchise, which come to think of it was what it always has been. Old characters from previous versions are brought back, new characters are introduced and future adventures are potentially in the offing. Blaming action films for commercialism is ridiculous, that is their point after all, but they have to be successful at it or they’re just wastes of time. And xXx: Return of Xander Cage is giant, explody waste of time.