'XXX: Return Of Xander Cage' Is "Silly, Trashy & Utterly Ridiculous"

xxx: return of xander cage

The assignment, should your old pal Film Carew choose to accept it, was elementary: go watch the latest xXx [sic for annoyingly-stylised eternity] movie, then make fun of it in print. It seemed like a simple task, but, watching Return Of Xander Cage, I realised I’d been beaten to the punch: the movie was too busy making fun of itself.

To franchise recap, for those too scared to type ‘XXX movies’ into their search engine: in 2002, Vin Diesel starred as a Poochie-esque extreme-sports bro turned super-spy; the film the dream of some Hollywood suit out to give James Bond a Mountain Dew make-over. The film, as market-ready prefab popcorn movie product, duly made a shit-ton of cash, which demanded an obligatory sequel (from now on: let’s call ’em obligquels). Instead of waiting to find a break in Diesel’s movie-star schedule, producers went the fast-and-nasty follow-up route, bringing in an ill-cast Ice Cube for 2005’s xXx: State Of The Union, the franchise rewritten on the fly as exploitation-worthy vessel for angry black insurgency, not extreme-sports-bro-down.

A decade removed from the little-remembered sequel, and Diesel dusted off the old franchise. With equal parts audacity and cynicism, he sought to revive xXx in the style of the Fast & Furious franchise: with an ‘inclusive’ ensemble cast and an air of carefree fun. So, here comes Diesel again, aided by a global cohort —Hong Kong superstar (and recent Rogue Oner) Donnie Yen, Bollywood starlet Deepika Padukone, Thai martial-arts legend Tony Jaa, Mandopop pin-up Kris Wu, queer Australian icon Ruby Rose, Degrassi graduate Nina Dobrev, Scottish GoT grunt Rory McCann, Brazilian soccer hero Neymar— that’ll help shill the movie in foreign markets.

Gladly, Diesel, director D.J. Caruso, and screenwriter F. Scott(!) Frazier know the kind of movie they’re making. Return Of Xander Cage is fast, silly, trashy, and utterly ridiculous; at once a roll-out of spy-movie tropes and a running parody thereof. Pronounced dead in State Of The Union, Diesel is back, barely giving a shit. And, before you make any gags about his changed physique —or a middle-aged man in embarrassing tatts somehow being the coolest cat in the room— Dobrev soon compares this comeback to Guns n’ Roses at Coachella; Return Of Xander Cage self-aware, and self-critical enough, to fight off its fate as feature-length Fat Axl meme.

Diesel delivers every line —half of them winkingly to camera— with a complete lack of conviction; Toni Collette, as ball-bustin’ bosswoman who drags Diesel back into the game, delivers a slyly comic turn bristling with acknowledged camp; and Rose gets the film’s few lines that’re actually funny, not just deliberately-cheesy. The characterisation is wafter-thin, the central MacGuffin idiotic, the suspense scant, the suspension-of-disbelief non-existent. It’s a film in which Diesel and Yen ride dirt-bikes through a hail of automatic weaponfire, with no threat that they’ll ever get a scratch, only for their dirt-bikes to turn into jet-skis, perfect for barrelling along the open face of a CGI tube. Radical!

It’s a preposterous moment in a film that’s a parade of preposterousness. But, Frazier’s script knows what it’s doing; that preposterousness played up, turned comic, made mockery of. In one of many screenwritten moments, herein, that sets the quaint notion of ‘believability’ on fire, Rose fires a bullet, from an adjacent building through a window, through a strategically coordinated gap in Diesel’s fingers, where it duly plugs the evil guy square in the forehead. It’s ridiculous, but even moreso when you look closer: Diesel, to the delight of the film’s intended audience of teenage boys, is pulling a ‘shocker’.

This moment symbolises everything Return Of Xander Cage is about: action without meaning or consequence, plot pandering to pubescent bros. Whilst the presence of Jaa and Yen may have fans dreaming of martial-artistry, they spend most of their time riding (but not actually) motorcycles, doing stupid shit that, supposedly, looks ‘cool’. As with the Fast & Furious franchise, there’s an utter weightlessness to everything: gunfire, car-crashes, motorbike backflips, and extreme-sports extremities all rendered free of gravity, both figurative and literal. It’s an action-movie that plays like a video-game: bright, attention-span arresting, and free from mortality. And, making it feel evermore like a video game, Return Of Xander Cage is, too, a work of pure, unadulterated, utterly-shameless adolescent-male fantasy.

Diesel flips the bird to authority, cracks wise in the face of death, performs dare-devil acts of righteous-bro-ness, and has scantily-clad, silent, neither-characterised-nor-named women throwing themselves at him wherever he goes. If that sounds bad, know that Wu plays an EDM-DJ dickbag, who bobs his head for The Drop and then fires off a few rounds into a Stormtrooper-worthy parade of anonymous, military-fatigue-clad cannon-fodder. There’s a recurring device in which even the least-complex plot points or most-uncomplicated sentences are boiled down to base simplicity; and this crests, on close, when Samuel L. Jackson —the only veteran of all three xXx movies!— commands that Diesel’s job is to “kick some ass, get the girl, and try to look dope while you’re doing it”.

And, so goes the xXx MO. This is a flick for people who think that tattoos, semi-automatic weapons, mute women in lingerie, ‘exotic’ locations, car crashes, and breaking glass are “dope”. But, due to its knowing B-movie-ness, Return Of Xander Cage also works as a film for people who want to laugh at those people, and at the movie itself. So, whilst my mission remains the same —watch the film, make fun of it in print— the end result is unexpected: I enjoyed Return Of Xander Cage so much more than Martin Scorsese’s Silence.