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XXX: Return of Xander Cage is unapologetically dumb and that’s just fine

XXX: Return of Xander Cage is unapologetically dumb and that’s just fine

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XXX: Return of Xander Cage is opening on the day of President-elect Trump’s inauguration, and in that context, it’s a surprisingly illuminating film. Back in 2002, when the first XXX movie came out, its ex-government superspy protagonist embodied the same kind of dudebro jingoism that helped propel Trump to the White House. Yet, here he is, 15 years later, embracing a progressive, globalist outlook that’s utterly anathema to the new leader of the free world. “There are no more patriots,” Xander Cage says, practically winking at the audience. “Only rebels and tyrants.” This, of course, comes after he goes skiing through a rainforest.

Return of Xander Cage, just like the original XXX, shouldn’t work as entertainment even on paper. It’s James Bond meets The Fast and the Furious, only with skateboards and motorcycles. It has some of its influences’ worst impulses, which let it go over the top in almost every way, good sense be damned. But it’s fun and mostly inoffensive, never taking itself too seriously while it rewards its inexplicable fans. Better still, it makes every effort to borrow from the Fast series’ latter-day push for more diverse heroes, something the action genre needs right now. Make no mistake: the new XXX is as dumb as its title suggests. But as a leader defining where dumb action movies should go in the years ahead, it’s surprisingly solid.

Spoilers ahead.

XXX: Return of Xander Cage, which is amazingly the third entry in this series, is designed to be a return to form for Cage, codename: Triple X, legendary superspy and playboy. After NSA agent and Triple X program founder Gibbons (Samuel Jackson) is seemingly killed by a superweapon known as Pandora’s Box, the agency turns to Xander Cage (Diesel), back from the dead — he died in the gruesome The Death of Xander Cage short, but whatever — and ready for one more job. He and his crew have to face off against a group of former Triple X agents led by Xiang (Donnie Yen) and Serena Unger (Deepika Padukone), but before long, the plot, such as it is, ventures into “not everything is as it seems” territory.

The movie is one big excuse for Vin Diesel to hang out with some new friends

Let’s not pay too much attention to the plot. Really, the movie is one big excuse for freshly minted megastar Vin Diesel to have fun with his cool friends, and it shows even (or rather, especially) when things are blowing up. Diesel, iconic as the Fast and the Furious films’ brooding Dominic Toretto, is all smiles and bad one-liners in this movie, making him seem like the most approachable extreme-athlete-turned-secret-agent ever conceived. His team of “the good, the extreme, and the completely insane” includes aerialist sniper Adele Wolff (Ruby Rose), stunt man Tennyson (Game of Thrones’ Rory McCann), tech specialist Becky Clearidge (Nina Dobrev), and all-around random dude who’s just “fun to be around” Harvard Zhou (Kris Wu). Like Cage, none of these lunatics should be of any use fighting secret agents. But who cares! Everyone is so game for the proceedings, no matter how ridiculous they are — at one point, there’s a motorcycle chase inside a cresting wave — that it’s genuinely hard not to be swept up in it.

That’s a core part of the film’s appeal. It not only revels in its silliness, it lets the audience in on it. If Cage knocks someone out with a motorbike backflip, it’s easy to imagine the movie saying, “Yeah, bro. We did that.” But at times, the self-aware absurdity verges into unnecessary fan-service territory. Early in the film, there’s a whole sequence where Cage goes on a fact-finding mission to reclaim the coat he wore in the first movie. Later, he jettisons a team of soldiers out the back of a military transport plane, just like he was in the original. He even repeats his catchphrase, “I live for this shit,” in the climax. (Yes, something explodes.) These are fun little sequences, but it’s hard to imagine who loves XXX enough to thrill at the references. It’s clear in those moments that the movie is straining to ignite a popular franchise, or pretend it was one all along.

(L-R) Tony Jaa as Talon, Michael Bisping as Hawk, and Donnie Yen as Xiang 
(L-R) Tony Jaa as Talon, Michael Bisping as Hawk, and Donnie Yen as Xiang 

But then there’s Donnie Yen, fresh off Rogue One and ready to capture Return of Xander Cage’s entire DGAF ethos. Yen is easily one of the best things about the movie, not just because his fight choreography is both brutal and beautiful. He oozes charisma as soon as he leaps on-screen and starts kicking ass, so it makes sense that he was chosen once upon a time to be a Triple X operative.

Donnie Yen steals the show every chance he gets

And that seems to be the point: that anyone can be as good as, if not better than, Xander Cage himself. Where the original XXX traded in the kind of Mountain Dew-fueled machismo that seemed tailor-made for early-Bush-era teen boys, his return is far more inclusive, and therefore more attractive. Return of Xander Cage, unlike, say, the Bourne Identity series, features men and women of color being “extreme” right along with our hero. In spite of its unfortunate tendency to treat women as furniture, the film also manages to pass the Bechdel Test with relative ease, something Oscar contender Deadpool never actually pulled off. And in the end, the movie rejects the idea that its heroes need to defend the state that sponsored them. Instead, they settle for protecting people who need them. It’s not a deep message by any means, but it works — especially in this particular cultural moment.

In the same way the Fast and Furious movies and Bond movies tend to be “bad,” XXX: Return of Xander Cage is certainly bad. It makes no effort to make sense on a plot level, it’s not breaking new ground where action movies are concerned, and only the most diehard Vin Diesel fans are clamoring for a XXX franchise. But there’s nothing wrong with the occasional B-movie when the creators only want you to have fun. And when that movie bests even Marvel at featuring people who deserve a shot at embodying whatever it means to be an American hero today, it might just deserve a chance.