After the NSA is attacked, Gibbons goes on the run and springs ex-SEAL Darius Stone (Ice Cube) out of prison to hunt down the perpetrators. Stone ends up discovering a conspiracy by his former commanding officer-now SecODef (Willem Defoe) to kill the president and take over the government in a military coup.
If I had watched this movie when it first came out, I think I would have hated it. I ended up watching it on Netflix after xXx: The Return of Xander Cage. It is not great, but with the benefit of 15 years and knowing where the franchise headed next, State of the Union is just a fun waste of time.
This movie feels so much more relevant now. At the time it felt like a supped-up version of 90s government paranoia. The movie is about as cartoonish as GI Joe: Retaliation, another movie that features a hostile takeover of the White House.
This movie does feature an internal coup by right wing warhawks but the movie never builds upon the paranoia of its premise.
According to the internet, the primary influence on this script were paranoid 70s thrillers like Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View. Knowing this makes me kinda love this silly movie more.
Overall, while it has a better story and slightly more defined character, these qualities are botched by hamfisted execution. Lee Tamahori is a talented filmmaker who has been miscast as a big budget Hollywood entertainer.
I do like how the movie launches straight into the action - we are reintroduced to Augustus Gibbons as his base is attacked by a squad of hi-tech commandos. Featuring plenty of CG-augmented gadgets and explosions, this sequence comes across as live-action GI Joe. Maybe it is because of Tamahori’s work on Die Another Day, I was ready for the film’s simplistic, cartoon-like aesthetic - the movies are aesthetically from the same universe.
Straight off the bat this opening action sequence sets up one of my major issues with the movie: it looks way too overlit, like a car commercial. This scene would be far more exciting if it took place at night.
While the movie is bobbins, the script is far superior to that of its predecessor. The plot is pure airport thriller but it is a fun one. And unlike the original xXx, Darius Stone has identifiable motivations and has a believable grudge against the villain - on that basis, his rebelliousness is more tangible than Xander Cage.
The filmmakers also reverse the dynamic between Gibbons and xXx - because they are on the run, Gibbons and co are at Darius’s mercy. It is more dramatically satisfying (in theory) than the relationship between Gibbons and Xander Cage. The original movie pivoted around a familiar premise of a civilian becoming a secret agent, but it means Cage is never as active as he should be - and feels less like the independent spirit he is supposed to be.
If this movie were directed more earnestly, Ice Cube’s casting might jostle. When I first watched the movie, I felt he had presence but not enough to work as the lead of this movie. Now, it just adds to the faux toughness of it all.
I do feel like the movie would work better if we were introduced to Ice Cube in the action that sent him to prison. He cannot play that backstory on his own. If Darius were played by an actor who could play that history - I was thinking Laurence Fishbourne - then the film might have worked as is. But the movie feels like it needs to establish the animosity between Darius and his former commanding officer Deckert (Dafoe) visually.
We also need to define how he is xXxtreme because the whole point of the original movie was having an extreme sports daredevil as a secret agent. Here we have a special forces soldier, which is a little cliche in this genre.
The acting is mostly earnest ham, but Scott Speedman is miscast as the good NSA guy on Darius’s tail. The character is bland and the actor does not carry any weight as a potential threat to Darius.
There are a couple of highlights in the movie.
The idea that an American president would want to cut the Pentagon’s budget is utterly ridiculous, but the idea that a warmonger would stage a coup to stop them feels completely reasonable today. But while its influences were 70s conspiracy movies, xXx 2 feels like one of those movies if it was made by eighties action movie house The Cannon Group - it is so simple and action-focused it feels more like a computer-generated remake of Invasion USA, The Delta Force or Cobra.
While I find most of the direction to be lacklustre, there are some good moments: Gibbons’ death scene is actually well-done - particularly the reveal of Willem Dafoe in half-shadow.
The scene where Ice Cube plays a reverend and cheerfully disarms a NRA rep is his best performance. It is OTT but he is so at ease and self-aware that the scene is funnier than it probably read on the page.
The set piece where Darius Stone infiltrates the Washington party as a waiter is almost making a point about race and class in America. The casting of the party is mostly old and white. When he escapes the party, henchmen follow him into the kitchen and realise that all the waiters are black.
These are micro moments of near-intelligence that prevent me from dismissing it entirely.
But then the movie also features elements which are great because they do not work at all: The terrible nu-metal cover of ‘Fight the Power’ is the most emblematic thing of this movie. It might be the best laugh in the movie.
The interesting idea that they intro at the end is that there is going to be a new xXx in the next movie. While I do not regret there were no sequels, I do find it interesting that - like Fast & Furious - this is a series which accidentally backed itself into ideas which would be better utilised in later instalments.
The big problem with this movie is the same problem I had with the original, but for completely different reasons: bad action sequences.
While the editing and shot selection are not as sloppy, the action in xXx 2 is not constructed to increase audience investment: The set piece on the aircraft carrier is illustrative of the film’s approach to action - there is no build-up or attempt to create tension in Darius’s infiltration.
The geography of the Capital Building shootout is terrible - I cannot tell where Darius is in relation to the bad guys. All the members of Darius’s unit are killed and its treated as a background detail - that is pretty callous.
The film feels like reheated cliches from the era’s action movies. The scene where Xzibit’s team hijack the truck from two black truckers feels like a sanitised version of a Michael Bay idea - even down to the cutaways to their OTT reaction when Xzibit’s crew reveal the weapons hidden under the cheese. It is such an obvious tired racist trope it just draws attention to how recycled the movie feels.
While I vaguely enjoy most of the movie, the third act is easily the worst scene in the franchise. The CGI in the car chase is only better than the CGI when the car jumps onto the train tracks. It all ends with the most boring villain demise I can recall - made worse by Samuel L. Jackson’s line: “Your turn to do or die general” - it’s too long and they edit it in just before the missile hits the train. It feels off, like the missile would have hit the train as he said “your turn-”.
There is a reasonable idea for an action movie here, but it is not xXx. Two movies in and they have thrown the original concept out - thankfully the sequel would make up for this.
Ultimately, this movie illustrates the difference between an idea and a story. This movie has an interesting idea, but there is no story.
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