Directed by: D.J. Caruso
Written by: F. Scott Frazier
Starring: Vin Diesel, Donnie Yen, Deepika Padukone
xXx is excessive, an 80s action movie dialed up to 11, with all the ridiculous action, cheesy one-liners and sexy women you could ask for. This is all the movie is, and all it sets out to be.
*Warning: Spoilers Ahead*
A hacking device called "Pandora's Box" is being used to pull satellites out of the sky and crash them in to Earth for strategic strikes. The device is captured by the CIA, but then quickly stolen by a crack team of action heroes (led by Donnie Yen), which leads CIA Agent Jane Marke (Toni Collette) to track down Xander Cage (Diesel) and have him retrieve Pandora's Box. After killing Xander off in the second xXx, this film just retcons him back with a quick 'he faked it' and is then right back in to the action.
There's little more to the plot than this, apart from the usual action tropes of reconsidering who the bad guy is and inevitable betrayals based around murky motivations about surveillance and security vs freedom, and there really doesn't need to be. Everything else is just an excuse for Vin Diesel to hit on sexy women and occasionally get in to implied orgies, or perform outrageous stunts that you know are impossible but don't really care because they look cool. Donnie Yen and Tony Jaa both get a chance to show off their fighting and acrobatic skills, though Jaa is a little wasted in his mostly pointless role, and the rest of the cast apart from Padukone are mostly pointless past their cool introductions.
The action sequences vary between good and bad; there's a lot of the "cut-o-rama" style of editing in some of these scenes, but there's a fair few that aren't, and there's obviously some fun to be had in the silliness of skiing down a jungle mountain in Brazil, surfing using a dirt bike apparently outfitted for the water, or fighting and flipping over cars in the middle of a busy road. It's mindless action, with no real stakes or anything to really care about, but it's one of another in a long line of movies that are just designed to entertain you for an hour and a half, with its place squarely in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, when you need to simply turn your brain off for a while.
The Verdict: xXx: Return of Xander Cage is essentially what it tries to be, an outlandish action movie designed to do nothing more than get the adrenaline pumping and look cool. It's not amazing, nor does it really try to be, but it may be worth the watch if you don't mind checking your logic and critical thinking at the door.
Rating: 5/10
Published January 22nd, 2017
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