VIN DIESEL ROARS BACK
Xander Cage is even more xXx-treme 15 years later
It’s been a long time since Xander Cage (Vin Diesel) flexed his tattooed neck muscles and effortlessly bounded off an exploding vehicle in mid-air. Fifteen years, to be exact. There have been six Fast and Furious movies and three Riddick films made in the interim — not to mention a couple other notable world events.
Xander is back in the Zone (Xone?) — bigger, better, more tatt’ed and xXx-treme than ever. But it’s not the usual N.S.A. handler, Augustus Gibbons (scarfaced Samuel L. Jackson) who comes knocking at Xander’s door. Instead, Xander’s down-skiingthrough-a-jungle shenanigans are met by the cold-stone glare of one blond-haired federal badass named Jane (Toni Collette). She coolly ropes the criminal daredevil back into helping the U.S. government track down “Pandora’s Box,” some kind of precious boxy device capable of launching military satellites that can scorch the Earth, among other worlddestroying properties.
Xander must hunt down a group of unknowable assailants as fast and deadly as he is. But to get there, he needs a crew. The new xXx team consists of sniper expert Adele Wolff (Ruby Rose), stunt-driver Tennyson “The Torch” (Rory McCann) and “Nicks” (Kris Wu), a DJ who I suppose has some lethal recordscratching skills up his sleeve or something.
In an unsurprising twist, the baddies have exactly the same xXx-treme background and messy, complicated, pro-anarchic feelings about working for The Man as our xXx crew. Xiang (Donnie Yen), Serena (Deepika Padukone) and Talon (Tony Jaa) ain’t nothing to mess with. The movie is mostly structured around set pieces that highlight their individual skills and charms.
There’s the martial-arts finesse of Yen and Jaa, who each get to shine in individual scenes, twisting motorbikes and oncoming cars into beautifully choreographed moves as if the mega-ton hunks of dangerous metal are mere dance props.
Rose’s snarky humour makes a strong presence, supplemented with on-the-nose punchlines about her sexual orientation by Becky (Nina Dobrev), an awkward cute girl in glasses who replaces the dorky Q-like techsupport agent Toby (Michael Roof) from the last two films.
Then there’s Padukone’s stink eye. Being an action film geared toward the bro demographic, there’s no lack of male-gazing close-ups on the female form, but kudos to the xXx producers for making the film multinational and diverse (perhaps the Chinese funding played a role).
It’s not long before the teams are working kind-of together to defeat common enemies. This is where xXx 3 gets interesting, particularly for a 2017 film
reviving a silly franchise as old as the millennium. xXx has long championed anarchy.
In the original, Xander had no choice but to help the N.S.A. His character’s devil-may-care attitude was based as much on an apolitical penchant for thrillseeking as it was on a holierthan-thou attitude toward the rich and corrupt. His successor in the sequel State of the Union, Darius Stone (Ice Cube), was of similar mind. The series’ conspicuous disregard for white collars dovetailed beautifully with the “eff the police” attitude that a hip-hop icon such as Ice Cube brought to the series.
Here the anti-establishment quips come fast and furious: “There are no more patriots — just rebels and tyrants,” says a reluctant Xander to his new, Hillary-styled boss. Or as one underground hottie tells Xander the muscle-y maverick, “I used to think you were the man, until I realized you were working for The Man.”
For a film franchise that is, in the words of the late Roger Ebert, more “theatre of the absurd” than “action thriller,” such political acuity makes Return of Xander Cage that much more fun and hard-hitting, especially at a time when fewer and fewer people trust even their own governments to do the right thing.