Vin Diesel’s plump-necked, vest-wearing action hombre Xander “XXX” Cage has come lumbering back onto the big screen, delivering sleepy zingers in that growly laryngeal voice, for the first time since 2002. Sadly, it’s the least anticipated franchise renewal imaginable. Only the release of a new Police Academy film could cause less excitement. But Vin, great ridiculous beefcake lunk that he is, does provide us with some fun.
Diesel became the action genre’s lost hero after the first XXX film, in which he played the skateboarding XXX-treme sports guy recruited by Samuel L Jackson to fight for justice. Then he got killed off for the 2005 sequel when Diesel’s fee demands got reportedly XXX-cessive and he was ignominiously replaced by Ice Cube. From then on, Diesel appeared to concentrate on the hugely lucrative Fast & Furious series and his much-cherished sci-fi action hero Riddick which failed to give him solo stardom. But now he has brought Xander Cage back from the dead in a new film made possible by Chinese co-production investment.
And perhaps weirdly, it does have something of the goofy ridiculousness that made the first movie enjoyable. There’s a large amount of 80s/90s-style action-movie silliness, including a shootout on a plane that’s about to crash, topped off with a freefall stunt that Sir Roger Moore would have been proud of. It’s a film to remind you of a comment from the late Roger Ebert: the XXX films were more Theatre of the Absurd than Action Movie. There’s a very entertaining skateboarding scene in the beginning when Xander hanging on to a moving vehicle, like Michael J Fox at the beginning of Back to the Future. And Donnie Yen makes an appearance, treating us to some watchably frantic martial arts moves. Indonesian action legend Tony Jaa also shows up, although his skills are a bit wasted.
The action begins when a satellite falls to earth, and it appears that some sinister bad guys are using a hacking device called a “Pandora’s Box” to bring them down – and intending to use this as a quasi-nuke threat. Intelligence chief Toni Collette convenes a top-level meeting to discuss this at the CIA “headquarters” in New York City (wait: did the Agency move from Langley, Virginia?) Donnie Yen and his comrades show up and astonish one and all with their badassery. There’s only one guy with the cojones to take these people on and that’s Xander. He is smartly re-introduced into the action, apparently hiding out. So his death was a fake, but this film spends zero plot time on trying to style that out, and perhaps that’s all for the best.
Xander convenes his own rag-tag crew of mavericks, attitude-merchants, outsiders and scofflaws, all very different from the uptight world of uniformed jarhead army types for whom Xander has nothing but contempt. He pursues Donnie and the other wrongdoers to a series of faraway climes where they try to disconcert him in a nightclub by lobbing a grenade across the table. As one of Xander’s assistants puts it: “Grenades? What is this, Eastern Europe in the early 90s? What are they going to do next, send you a fax?” But actually, the early 90s is this film’s spiritual home, and for all its absurdity, you can’t really take offence at any of it. For XXX4, I’d prefer more non-weaponised combat and some more old-fashioned silly post-action punchlines.
