Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
The turn of the Willennium wasn’t the brightest hours for the Bond franchise, with the likeable Pierce Brosnan staring down the barrel of increasingly unlikable films. There were some questioning if it wasn’t time for Bond to hang up the Walther and retire to the Bahamas, and no shortage of wannabes looking to take over for a new generation.
Hence this big dumb wet fart of a film, again teaming up director Rob Cohen and Vin Diesel off the back of The Fast and the Furious, for which xXx essentially retrospectively act as a preview as to where that franchise would eventually end up. Diesel plays xXxander Cage, initially seemingly doing some sort of very early pre-YouTube social experiment, car thievery cum bridge driving with some video equipment that immediately makes this film seem like a million years old.
Meanwhile, the sharp suited, suave traditional secret agents of the NSA aren’t able to infiltrate the murky, tattooed, extreme subculture of Anarchy 99, a Russian terrorist cum paramilitary collective that wants Anarchy. I’m presuming they were aiming to have achieved Anarchy in 1999, but this film came out in 2002. Still, I applaud their commitment to brand recognition. 2000AD did the same. Seems to be working for them.
Anyway, NSA bigwig Augustus Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson) strongarms Cage into working for him to infiltrate and bring down these ne’erdowells. Incidentally, I will always remember the character of Augustus Gibbons, mainly because of his ridiculous name, and Jackson’s simple and bold introductory line of “I’m Augustus Gibbons” being the exact point on first viewing where my patience for this film’s nonsense was exhausted. No mate, you’re not Augustus Gibbons. You’re Sam Jackson, and you deserve better, and I’m very sorry.
So off Cage goes, worming his way into Yorgi’s (Marton Csokas) gang, under the cover of representing wealthy Americans looking for cars stolen to order, meeting Asia Argento’s Yelena, seemingly Yorgi’s girlfriend before revealing herself to be an undercover Russian operative, and the two team up to stop Yorgi and co’s plan to start World War 3, that old chestnut, by firing off stolen, secret biochemical weapons.
I had little affection for it back in the day, because it is was then, and is now, so brazen in what it was built from. It’s the exact same barrel scrapings of a Bond script that Bond films of the time themselves were using, but this one has tattoos. Every other beat is exactly the same, so any marketing puff of this being “Bond for the young’uns” was just the most obviously superficial gloss that no-one particularly bought then, and less so now.
The next film we’ll talk of came out the same year as xXx, but feels achingly contemporary. xXx feels palaeolithic. Curiously, it’s so blatantly of its era that I can’t bring myself to have anything like the contempt I had for it back in the day. It so typifies the stagnation of Hollywood action films of the era, before they were forced into stealing a few archetypes from other genres and cultures, that it’s like a little time capsule of how things used to be.
It’s sort of nostalgic, in a way. It’s such a good example of a bad example that it deserves some sort of recognition, as a cautionary tale, if nothing else. But, no, the action scenes are, at their very best, passable, the plot, characters and motivations are mainly absent, the CG has aged like the inverse of a fine wine, and while by most accounts Vin Diesel is a nice guy, the only character he can play with any fire is Riddick, and he seems as bored with his turn here as I was. Asia Argento remains Asia Argento.
This really is a Bond knock-off in all of the worst ways. Entirely charmless, and in no way deserving of two sequels. It is not, I suppose, the world’s worst film, but nonetheless I am glad I will never have to think of this film again.