Review of XXX

Introduction

Although it’s unlikely that we’ll be seeing him in any costume dramas any time soon (Vin Diesel is ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’), the chrome-domed star of ‘Pitch Black’ and ‘The Fast and the Furious’ has quickly become one of Hollywood’s highest paid young actors. His first bona fide blockbuster, the $100 million ‘XXX’, casts him as Xander Cage, an extreme sports guru fond of flinging himself off tall things with a joyless hedonist philosophy and an economy of political statement (in his opening scenes, he steals the car of a right-wing politician, only to promptly destroy it.) However, after one of their top agents is killed attempting to infiltrate suspected terrorist organisation Anarchy ’99, Diesel is recruited by the NSA to act as an undercover agent in order to ingratiate himself amongst his fellow style-junkies and find out about their devious schemes. However, when Anarchy ’99’s chief orchestrator Yorgi (Marton Csokas) discovers Cage’s secret, it’s up to our slap-head hero and Yorgi’s heroin-chic-bit-of-skirt-with-a-heart-of-gold to save the universe.

Video

Unsurprisingly, there are no traces of compression signs or artifacts and the anamorphic transfer is extremely sharp. It’s no coincidence that the editors of ‘XXX’, Chris Lebenzon and Joel Negron, are frequent Bruckheimer aides and masters of the stroboscopic bible of celluloid shredding which preaches, among other things: ‘Thou shant use one shot when sixteen will do’. If the approach here is marginally less frenzied than most Bruckheimer efforts, Cohen’s repeated deployment of death metal during high-octane stunts ensures that the results are equally numb and ineffectual.

Audio

A cluttered 5.1 track that doesn’t quite have the intensity one might have expected (the opening scene featuring a live performance by death-Nazi-techno-metal rockers Rammstein feels particularly flat). However, the actions scenes are fairly competently sound designed and the film delivers the bangs and whistles with acceptable aplomb.

Features

“How do you fuse James Bond with Fred Durst?” screenwriter Rich Wilkes posits rhetorically on one of the many featurettes included on this disc, and you can bet that you will find at least a partial explanation of the film’s attempt to cross-pollinate the well worn spy-action genre with current trends in extreme sports. Sadly, the ‘Filmmakers Diary’ promises a gritty, on-set documentary, but instead delivers something barely a step away from an EPK love fest. Along with some dull special effects examinations we get some trailers, a music video and a collection of deleted scenes, notable for some added raunch during the poll-dance sequence and some more explosive carnage with the Czech police during the final slaughter. In his commentary, Cohen clearly thinks he’s indulging in some heady postmodern cocktail, and whilst this makes his slightly delusional comments frequently amusing, the aftertaste is one of pretentiousness, a director who no longer has any realistic conception of what he’s looking at.

Conclusion

A wannabe Gen-Y mega-franchise that’s really just clunky, Reaganite nuke-em-up comfort food for sensation junkies. The plot really isn’t worth getting the hump over, although it is probably more consistent than the washing-line narratives of recent Bond pictures, it is clear that little interest has been paid to internal plot logic. The film’s director, aging hipster Rob Cohen, leaves no flash-in-the-pan stylistic fad left unexploited in the pursuit of absolute trend-slavery. And whilst ‘The Fast and the Furious’ managed to at least combine its austere surface obsessions with sincere geekyness, consumer fetishism seems to exist here for its own sake.

Diesel, aptly heralded as a Millennial action hero in the Schwarzenegger/Stallone vein, whose moniker is clearly overcompensating for a distinct lack of onscreen charge, lumbers through the set-pieces like a shaved tree-trunk, eliciting as little humor as possible from the typically quip-heavy script. Diesel is the sculpted, acceptable face of Hollywood multiculturalism, and it is probably his bland, speed-dialed personality that is responsible for this; an ethnic hybrid, with the edges worn-off for the mainstream audience. He comes off as far from being an exotic new talent, and more like an attitudinal teddy bear. I can assure you, he’s just about the only ripped hard-man that women seem to like more than men. As dastardly crook Yorgi, Marton Csokas can rest safe in the knowledge that if the rough-and-tumble world of ham-acting and megalomania gets too much for him, he can always specialize in selling grease-chic to those of a similar bent, given his seemingly inexhaustible supply. Looking like Michael Hutchence in Dickensian drag and snarling unrepentantly about “Mather Ruusha” at every opportunity does not a great bad guy make.

Momentary distraction is derived from a series of repetitive but increasingly preposterous stunts, from the relatively prosaic sight of Diesel flipping his newly procured Corvette off a bridge, through skimming his moto-cross over countless big bangs to finally outrunning an avalanche by pirouetting rather daintily on a snow-board. Diesel maintains a look of po-faced sterility throughout, that manages to bypass both Zen oneness and spiritual ecstasy to arrive at pure boredom. As it happens, it doesn’t really give much credit to the youth culture its exposing so favourably, Diesel’s non-conformist angst proves skin-deep, Cage’s supposedly profound, life-defining cynicism is soon pacified by swish gadgets, guns and cars, a willful, pragmatic male role-model (in the shape of Samuel L. Jackson) and a feisty bird with nice tits and stock ‘independence’, which, in typically Bondian fashion, is soon converted into genial femininity in the closing coda, plastering Cage’s bod in oil before submitting to his sexual whims. Despite its zeitgeist-snaring pretensions, this ends up as a dated and rather conservative throwback to the reclaiming of Western individualistic/hedonist values from corrupt fundamentalists, that the film is supposedly satirizing.