Extreme sports enthusiast and protestor Xander Cage (Vin Diesel) is press-ganged into becoming a NSA agent.
His mission is to infiltrate a group of anarchists known as Anarchy 99 and prevent them from releasing ‘Silent Night’, a bioweapon from the Cold War.
TW: mention of sexual assault relating to this film’s director. Because we are living in the seventh circle of hell, it is also worth mentioning Diesel and co-star Asia Argento have faced allegations of assault.
In 2002, this movie was supposed to be a response to the James Bond franchise, and consolidate Vin Diesel’s status as a movie star.
It succeeded at the latter goal, but it had its thunder stolen by the unexpected success of The Bourne Identity, which would become the defining influence on the spy genre in the early decades of the 21st Century.
Looking back at xXx now, it feels like a time capsule for the pop culture trends of the 90s:
With its focus on extreme sports, nu metal soundtrack, and bad guys who just want chaos, xXx was out-dated by the time it came out.
I like the premise of the movie - take an outsider and make him a spy - but this movie seems to be all about hyping that idea rather than showing it.
The opening scene - in which a spy in a dinner suit tries to infiltrate a Rammstein show and is murdered - is meant to highlight how outdated Bond is, but it feels undercooked (a guy in a suit would look out of place in a rock concert in almost any era).
As a character, Xander Cage is a hollow vessel. He is established as an extreme sports fan, and an outsider, but his ideology is vague and small stakes - in his first scene, he targets a state senator who wants to ban videogames and rock music. Couldn’t this character have been a corporate shill or anti-environment?
Watching 2002-era Vin Diesel, it is a time-capsule of the performer in transition.
He does not have the quiet smoulder he has been doing since his return to the Fast and Furious movies. This is the last time he is leaning into the character actor thing he had been doing leading up to this.
While he has a go at embodying Xander’s cockiness and livewire nature, Diesel seems too even-keeled to work as a hellraiser.
This might be the effect of the last quarter century of Family antics, but Diesel works better as part of an ensemble. He is fine as the solid centre, but he has no one to bounce off of.
His earnestness also works against this movie. This might have something to do with the character’s lack of specificity, but Diesel’s earnestness on top of it just means the character, and the movie around him, feels bland.
In the end, it feels like the filmmakers had no real idea of how to tackle an outsider-as-secret-agent.
Take the scene where X is disavowed - this is a good narrative move, but the film does not make the next step of taking away all the government-approved gizmos, and he had to revert back to using his xXxtreme sports skills to save the day.
Now before we get too far, we have to bring up director Rob Cohen.
Cohen is allegedly a horrific human being. He has been accused of sexual assault by multiple people, including by lead actress Asia Argento. Thankfully, it appears that his career is over (although in these Trumpified times, who knows?).
He is also a very bad director.
The Fast and the Furious is functional, but with xXx he is trying to approximate the trends of the time, with the emphasis on quick-cutting, dutch angles and speed-ramping.
While these are elements of style, they are deployed without any.
And while the film uses a lot of practical stunts, they are ruined by Cohen’s shitty editing and lack of composition.
The shot choices are so bad - there is no sense of composition and the editing is really choppy. In the action sequences, the angles are often so wide and flat they look like behind-the-scenes footage.
Take the attack on the drug den - the shots of the attack are either too wide or too close, and Cohen overcuts the big showpiece moments (Diesel jumping over the fence; over the exploding building) so they are robbed of impact.
Another dire example is the scene of Yelena (Argento) breaking into Yorgi’s (Marton Czokas) safe - there are no shots where Diesel and Argento are in the same shot to build suspense. It is hard to establish where they are in terms of geography.
There is almost no sense that the filmmakers know the cinematic language for scenes - when Xander is hiding above the guards, we get shots of the guards and shots of Diesel, but no shot with both parties in the same frame.
Marton Czokas is a fine New Zealand actor with a unique presence, but he is a bit of a blank slate here. He comes across a little too young as well.
He has played an effective bad guy in many other movies (The Bourne Supremacy and The Equalizer), so this is probably an effect of the lack of imagination behind the camera.
xXx is not awful, but it is incredibly, soul-crushingly dull.
This movie shows that you need more than just extreme sports Bond, because James Bond technically does extreme sports. The attempts to appeal to the yoof with nu-metal is kind of funny, but the film is ultimately so unimaginative and poorly made it is just boring.
Skip this movie - watch the sequels.
Related reviews
xXx - The Death of Xander Cage (short)
xXx - The Return of Xander Cage
The Fast and the Furious
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