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You remember xXx, right? That howlingly moronic action movie from a few years back that planned to out-Bond James Bond and give the younger generation a superspy action hero of their very own? Yeah, that thing. Well here’s the sequel, only the hero from the first one is gone – killed with just one small piece of throwaway dialogue regarding bullets in Bora Bora. It seems that now the triple-X plan has changed: xXx won’t be the all-new and mega-sleeker 007 for a younger generation; it’s now going to be a revolving-door series of sequels in which new heroes pop with every new chapter. The only two constants will be Samuel Jackson with a half-melted face and five or six action sequences so profoundly stupid that they actually scar your brain.

Hero #2 is Mr. Ice Cube, who is a guy I’ve always liked. But despite my good feelings towards the Cube, there’s no getting around the fact that the guy’s as much of a good-guy action hero as Paris Hilton is a demure Mormon virgin. Cube works best as a glowering baddie or a cocksure sidekick. His gruff mumble and pedantic petulance don’t really suit a leading man role.

But that’s what’s so great! Cube is woefully miscast in a movie that’s just packed to the rafters with dumb concepts, insipid plot twists, and negligible acting performances! He’s the least awful thing in a movie full of awfulness. OK, I took notes, so here’s the plot:

Cube is former mega-soldier who’s sprung from a seven-year jail stint so he can replace the recently dead Vin Diesel, discover who killed all of Sam Jackson’s red-shirted technicians, drive a lot of human-sized Matchbox cars, leer at a few stray “booties,” and try to figure out if the character played by Willem Dafoe is evil or not. (Hint: It’s Willem Dafoe!)

Of course there’s a whole truck-load of hastily presented verbal hoo-hah about Evil Regiment this and Military Coup that, but all of this material is just a coat-hanger on which to hang a huge, glowing garment woven of explosions, neon, rockets, cars, glitter, machine guns, explosions, boats, cannons, bling, explosions, and tanks. (You’re welcome.)

I’m no snob when it comes to the mindless action fare. People often sputter directly into my face when I tell them I own Armageddon, Deep Rising, and 1941 on DVD. But those films are a trilogy of documented scientific fact compared to what goes in xXx 2! Why would a group of filmmakers aim to create an action sequence that looks real … if only you could ignore all laws of weight, height, mass, gravity, logic and intellect.

A 30-mile meteor crashing towards Earth, while outlandish, can be sold to a movie-watcher. But what if that meteorite hit the earth and bounced right off with a big juicy BOING? Or let's say the meteorite landed on the one rocket trigger that could save the president from a gang of lunatic zombie communist assassins. "Suspension of disbelief" is fine. "Intentional demolition of all things logical" is not. If you’re going to go to all the trouble of creating a really slick chase scene, why ruin it with a capper that looks like it fell out of Bizarro World? There’s a reason you only put so much whipped cream on top of your ice cream, y’know.

Director Lee Tamahori never knows when enough is enough. If an action scene should end at Point C, there’s Lee, down at Point L, waving maniacally and blowing up a train. I’d be happy to mention a few supporting actors who capably populate the background and bring some color into the affair, but alas, everything in this migraine of a sequel is playing fifth banana to the nearest explosion.

Still, "xXx: State of the Union" is better than the first entry, which is sort of like saying a mallet to the scalp is better than a hammer.

link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=11933&reviewer=128
originally posted: 04/29/05 17:45:29
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