Well you know me, I’ve been talking about the badass presence of Vin Diesel just as long as anyone has, anyone except for him. I’ve been looking forward to this moronic concept of a Vin Diesel star vehicle, figuring anything this stupid starring Vin Diesel would have to be a good time. You saw my epic dissertation on THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS so you know how I enjoy Vin’s egomaniacal charisma combined with Rob Cohen’s pathetic zeitgeist-chasing high conceptualism.

XXX is completely asinine. And I loved that about it. For about half an hour. Then it just got boring in the exact same way all the modern James Bond movies are boring. It takes a special type of standard lowering to enjoy ANYBODY driving around dreary european villages on motorcycles shooting machine guns and blowing things up in the usual ways. You can only watch a henchman shot into the air by an explosion so many times before you start to ask for more from your badass cinematists. I don’t care if you had a young Clint Eastwood riding piggyback on Steve McQueen, you’d still get bored with this movie before it got to the climax.

Vin Diesel plays Xander Cage, an “action sports” legend on “underground web sights.” In the opening he steals a Corvette from a senator at a country club. While the cops chase him he makes a video saying that the senator tried to ban rap music and video games. Then he jumps the car off a bridge and parachutes out. So he’s a terrorist folk hero to all pudgy 13 year old suburban kids in Slipknot t–shirts. Those kids who you see on the bus wearing big headphones to hide from the world until they are physically capable of growing their first soul patch.

The movie is obvious about playing to the fantasies of these kids. He mentions Playstation at least once, and knows how to use a gun from playing “first person shooter games”. The extreme sports angle is as humorous as you’d expect. My favorite touch is the scene where he is pointing at a map going over tactics with a team of special agents, and he’s holding a can of Amp.

Of course, the pro-rap and video game stunt gets Xander in trouble with Samuel L. Jackson of the NSA. Samuel wants to use him as an agent so he first runs him through some tests, kidnapping him and leaving him in dangerous situations. This is the fun part of the movie, when Vin gets to show off how smart he is and jump motorcycles sideways over barbed wire fences in an ESPN2 tribute to Steve McQueen’s jump in THE GREAT ESCAPE. We learn that he can perform death defying stunts, and that he likes to call people “monkeys” and talk in lists. (“#1, blah blah blah blah. #2, blah blah blah. And #3, blah blah BLAH blahblah.”) Then somebody tells him, “This isn’t one of your stunts!”

You also get a little glimpse into his lifestyle, which involves doing a stunt then going back to party with a bunch of tattooed white guys who enjoy skateboarding and co-opting black slang.

But then he gets his mission, and you spend the rest of the time waiting for the god damn thing to end. Part of the reason THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS was watchable was because the villain was so charismatic. Because he was Vin Diesel. In XXX you gotta watch Vin in a giant fur coat (admittedly a nice touch) trying to get in good with some scruffy guy in a long coat who talks in a Boris Badenov accent. The villains all have the distinct lack of presence and personality that you expect from a lesser Jackie Chan movie. They hang out upstairs in a dance club and then their plan just involves chemical weapons on a little submarine. And they call themselves “Anarchy 99”. There are more imaginative villains in POLICE ACADEMY sequels.

In Europe the least boring character is Dario’s daughter, Asia Argento. She’s just right for this type of movie but all that means is she’s real hot. And it’s not like they would’ve hired somebody that wasn’t real hot so that’s not getting the filmatists any points from me.

The story is completely generic, and so are the one-liners (except one real bad one: “Welcome to the Xander-Zone!”) I did appreciate the way the NSA aren’t COMPLETELY portrayed as good guys. They do save the day but they’re not as selfless as Xander ends up being. They are willing to let one city die instead of ten. He doesn’t want any city destroyed. Even though he likes to snowboard. Wrap your mind around THAT. The NSA follows the “gotta break a few eggs” philosophy, he sticks with “never leave a man behind”. But otherwise there’s not much clever are thoughtful here.

Which should be fine, right? In this type of movie. But you can’t just say yeah, this is XXX, it’s not supposed to have good parts. True, you don’t need to be smart or original. But at the VERY least you gotta do something memorable in the action department. I liked the stupid idea of using a dinner tray as a skateboard, and the snowboarding in front of an avalanche scene was okay I guess. But all the motorcycles and skydiving are old hat – the movie’s really not as different from James Bond as it thinks it is. And just like the car racing in THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, the whole “action sports” fad is not as inherently cinematic as Rob Cohen probaly thinks it is. When you see those videos of people flying down stairways on bicycles or rolling down impossibly steep mountains and ending up on their feet, its amazing because you know it’s real, and you can’t believe some fuckin moron actually did that on purpose. When you see Vin Diesel do it in a movie you know it’s not real, so all you feel is that itching feeling that you’re supposed to be thrilled.

I mean he does a decent enough job being the new highly paid action hero guy. Even if the character doesn’t have as much appeal as his supporting roles. But he really needs a more interesting movie surrounding him. Maybe the sequel will be better.

P.S. (I added this later)

The sequel oughta be like the first DIRTY HARRY sequel, questioning the values of the first movie. For all the talk about not selling out in the first part of the movie, XXX sure sells out fast and questions it little. I’d like to see all those guys who risked their lives helping him throw a senator’s car off a bridge react to their hero who now works for the man and flies around with a red white and blue parachute. Yes, he saved the world and that’s the right thing to do. But this is hollywood cheating, because the system he stands up against really isn’t trying to save the world, that’s why he stands up against it. I wanna see the system turn against XXX, and vice versa, or I don’t wanna see a sequel at all. End of story. No, there is no negotiating. Sorry.