(Membership)
State of the Union (2005)
Rich Wilkes (characters)
Simon Kinberg (written by)
For those arriving late, XXX is a sort of American 007, a special agent with a license to kill, burn rubber and ogle glamorous female spies. The main difference is that XXX is the type to slam back Red Bull, not sip vodka martinis. In the 2002 original, Vin Diesel had the title role, playing an extreme-sports daredevil recruited to save the world while snowboarding and jumping motocross bikes. It was escapist nonsense, and a lot of fun.
This time out, Diesel's character is dead and National Security Agency spymaster Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson) must coerce a new recruit to assume the XXX designation. He chooses Lt. Darius Stone (Ice Cube), halfway through a 20-year prison sentence for leading a mutiny against murderous U.S. Gen. George Deckert (Willem Dafoe) and breaking the officer's jaw in the process.
The scowling Stone's renegade ways are just what the NSA needs to foil a plot against the president. Deckert, now Secretary of Defense, looks at the dovish incumbent with daggers in his eyes. Ten points for any reader who can spot the movie's villain.
With pimped-out muscle cars supplied by ex-girlfriend/mechanic Lola (the ludicrously sexy Nona Gaye), Stone tackles the case by exceeding the speed limit and setting off explosions. Fully 84 percent of this film is explosions. Before I lost count, I ticked off an exploding house, an exploding barn, two exploding boats, two exploding tanks, five exploring doors, six exploding cars, an exploding truck, an exploding kitchen, an exploding train, an exploding national landmark and one imploding brain -- mine.
Visually, the film is on the verge of blowing a blood vessel, but it's an emotion-free zone, a boom-pow blitzkrieg that never rouses our feelings. Cube can be an engaging actor; he can also be hammier than Easter dinner. Here he's all unpersuasive attitude -- his efforts to act sultry with Gaye are forehead-slapping awful -- while Dafoe's villainous warmonger is a one-man Axis of Evil. These are not cardboard characters, they are prototypes for cardboard characters.
Astonishingly, the talented New Zealand director Lee Tamahori was in charge of the misbegotten project. With "The Edge,"Mulholland Falls" and "Die Another Day," Tamahori proved that he can deliver a thrilling action movie with sturdy performances. "XXX" unfolds in narrative bursts punctuated by gaps that are never filled in; it's as if the movie's own memory were short-circuited. Watching this agitating yet boring, inane and (worst of all for a would-be blockbuster) utterly cheap-looking effort, you wonder how it all could have gone so wrong.
