**/****
starring Vin Diesel, Samuel L. Jackson, Asia Argento, Martin Csokas
screenplay by Rich Wilkes
directed by Rob Cohen
by Walter Chaw The first film of the summer to actually make my ears bleed, Rob Cohen’s xXx is a lightshow wrapped around an idiot plot that may or may not become a franchise based entirely on how hungry audiences are for another poorly-made boom-boom fest and how susceptible they are to a marketing machine intent on repackaging a cheap updating of Condorman as “the next James Bond.” Vin Diesel (apparently separated at birth from his sister, David Schwimmer) plays monosyllabic Neanderthal Xander “my friends call me ‘X'” Cage, an extreme-sports political activist who steals conservative senators’ cars and drives them off bridges with pal Tony Hawk. When a dapper tuxedoed NSA (don’t ask) agent is assassinated at an industrial concert in Prague, lone wolf spymaster Gus Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson, in Batman supervillain Two-Face makeup) does a Dirty Dozen and recruits the shadowy agency’s next superagent from a pool of dangerous criminals.
After an interminable series of stupid “tests” (the key goal of which seems to be killing poor Danny Trejo yet again), xXx drops X into the middle of Prague, the cheapest place to shoot a movie nowadays, explaining why it’s appeared in no fewer than three films this summer (see also The Bourne Identity and Blade II). His task is to infiltrate a group of Russian bad guys calling themselves “Anarchy 99” by camping out in dance clubs–surrounded by hookers and euro-trash–and dishing out droning one-liners like, “Oh the things I do for my country”–“things” referring to, of course, lingerie models. The joyful misogyny and almost pathological lack of pretension are both of the saving graces of xXx, a movie so disinterested in making sense that its lack thereof becomes a towering monolith pointing to the pointlessness of the entire superspy genre.
Taking a virulently anti-intellectual stance that all but ensures wide and ferocious fan support, xXx presents Anarchy 99 as a bunch of disenfranchised ex-Russian military folks intent on destabilizing the world’s governments with a series of poison gas attacks undertaken by a solar-powered submarine named (wait for it…) “Ahab.” Apparently, no one involved in the making of xXx had read Moby Dick through to the end (why not name an airplane “Icarus,” for God’s sake?), and naturally the only thing that can render this watercraft’s deadly cargo inert is water. Because the brain trust behind xXx isn’t paying attention either, the Ahab submarine acts suspiciously like a hydrofoil during the picture’s cacophonous conclusion, allowing X to tool around Prague in a souped-up 1967 Pontiac GTO (sometimes blue, sometimes black, sometimes greenish) with Dario Argento’s untalented daughter Asia (pronounced “Ah-zee-ah”) providing a sort of goth-chick sounding board to Diesel’s grunted declarations.
Attempting to list all of the film’s screaming incomprehensibilities is madness, while the inclination to do so is rightly identified as a pastime reserved for people who came to the theatre with some expectation of coherence. xXx is a series of regularly spaced action sequences that, despite being incoherent (how does a motorcycle jump over a house without a ramp? Why jump out of an airplane to start an avalanche with grenades when grenades can be tossed out of the airplane? Etc.), at least have the decency to shake the fillings out of your teeth with an agreeable level of PG-13 irresponsibility. It’s the kind of movie I can imagine a hormone-addled version of myself about fifteen years ago enjoying a great deal, remembering that–like most fourteen-year-olds–I was an emotionally-fragile virgin with self-esteem issues, violent fantasies, and an adolescent taste in film predicated on the quantity of tits, ass, and explosions on parade. All others need not apply.
