Vin Diesel, Donnie Yen, and Deepika Padukone. © 2016 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
At a time when we feel especially powerless to change a world that seems to have gone mad, maybe a bulked-up hero that performs death-defying feats is just what we need? Even if it just to steal cable.
After a 12-year break, the third film in Vin Diesel’s XXX franchise opens with death from above. NSA agent Augustus Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson), who created the superagent program XXX, is talking to a new recruit when a satellite plummets to Earth, killing them. Meanwhile, Xander Cage (Vin Diesel), who died at the end of the previous installment—or DID he?—is placing a suspicious device high atop a transmission tower, descending to Earth himself in a kinetic flurry of gravity-defying moves. Cage races against a countdown, which we soon learn is the start of a soccer game; this stunt was all to bring a broadcast to a remote village of fans.
Cage gives the people what they want, and soon his government wants him. The NSA’s Jane Marke (Toni Collette) recruits him to recover Pandora’s Box, the device used to bring down the satellite that killed his old friend Gibbons. The suspect is counter-agent Xiang (Donnie Yen), the pursuit of whom sends Cage and a rag-tag team of operatives to a remote location in the Philippines where bikini-clad locals (some of whom I suspect are not actually Filipino) seduce him at a dance party.
It may all sound familiar and ridiculous, and it is, and much of the action is shot in the usual standard-issue Hollywood method of illegible camerawork. Yet there are enough set pieces that highlight the stunt work in a way that lets you can actually see what’s happening. These build up the kind of adrenaline rush that keeps you gritting your teeth and laughing at the audacity of it all.
Diesel is the star, and he has a presence that has somehow transformed his ordinary character actor looks into the cornerstone of multiple blockbuster franchises But this isn’t just a solo ego trip.
The movie’s international cast seems designed to milk maximum box office from US, Hong Kong and Bollywood markets. It’s a particularly strong showcase for Hong Kong star Yen. While the blind rebel martial arts master Yen played in Rogue One gave him a larger American audience, the movie that was praised for putting Mexican actor Diego Luna in the lead relegated him to little more than a goofy sidekick. XXX better shows off the mobility and steadfast personality that makes him one of the world’s great action heroes (if you haven’t seen any of the Ip Man movies, look them up on Netflix NOW).
XXX is occasionally incoherent, and Diesel’s delivery sometimes makes him come off like Adam Sandler on steroids. But the unlikely star becomes an absurd and likeable hero. There are inevitable callbacks to the previous films, but even if you haven’t seen them, there’s more than enough here to trigger your action movie synapses, as long as you can suspend disbelief. A lot of it.
XXX: Return of Xander Cage
Directed by D. J. Caruso
Written by Rich Wilkes
With Vin Diesel, Donnie Yen, Deepika Padukone
Rated PG-13. Contains extended sequences of gunplay and violent action, sexual material and language, and totally ridic stunts.
107 minutes
Opening at a multiplex near you.
