Immediately after the massive success of The Fast & the Furious in 2001, Vin Diesel signed on for a new potential action franchise. The following summer brought xXx, a James-Bond-does-extreme-sports action romp that made a killing at the box office and further cemented Diesel’s status as an action star on the rise. Unfortunately his ego got the better of him, and he foolishly dropped out of sequels to both of his potential franchises and worked sparingly the next few years. He rejoined his old crew for 2009’s Fast & Furious, the fourth film in the newly jumpstarted series, and followed it with three hugely successful F&F sequels that each upped the ante for action insanity. Now 15 years since he donned the fur coat (and 11 since the largely forgettable Diesel-free sequel xXx: State of the Union), he’s out to revive his other potential early-2000s franchise with xXx: Return of Xander Cage.
Return finds Cage once again being recruited to recover a top-secret electronic MacGuffin upon which the world’s fate rests. Naturally he runs into competing shady characters (though really, isn’t everyone in these movies a shady character?) looking for the same thing. This time, Cage has recruited a crack team of talented and dangerous weirdos (headlined by Orange is the New Black breakout badass Ruby Rose) to help him acquire the do-hickey, take down the bad guys and save the world. Plenty of spoilery (and occasionally confusing) twists and turns follow along with the requisite explosions and gunfire, not to mention some much-welcome martial arts fireworks from Donnie Yen and Tony Jaa. Return is at its heart boilerplate action fare.
This may lead one to question whether it was necessary for Xander Cage to return at all. It’s not like Diesel is struggling, with F&F promising three more installments (which after the death of Paul Walker now require him to pick up a bit more of the slack), and rumors of more Riddick films. (Oh, and some space movie where he plays a talking tree.) Not to mention the fact that the original xXx has poorly aged from a “James Bond for a new generation” to a bloated self-parody that truly only shows how ridiculous the early-2000s were. The ongoing explosion of superhero movies has crowded the fantasy action marketplace even more. Even the James Bond movies themselves are more culturally relevant than they were then thanks to Daniel Craig. Do we need another hero?
xXx: Return of Xander Cage offers us nothing we haven’t seen before, as action movies go. But as the franchise goes, it is a marked improvement over the two previous installments, particularly Cage’s debut outing. Where the 2002 xXx reveled in style over substance, coming off as a ridiculous Michael Bay James Bond fever dream, Return keeps it (mostly) real. (There IS that scene with the dirt bikes on the water, but we all know these aren’t documentaries.) Having actual martial artists like Yen and Jaa doing their thing amidst the usual incendiary devices certainly doesn’t hurt, nor does recruiting an engaging team to help share the load. The primary comic relief comes from Vampire Diaries star Nina Dobrev’s tech nerd Becky and Game of Thrones’ Rory McCann as the woefully underused wheelman Tennyson Torch, but it would be hard to argue that everyone in this movie didn’t have a blast making it. The only casting misstep may be Toni Collette as the CIA suit who hires Cage, going for scenery-chewing and missing the mark.
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| Is that chick in the front yawning? |
Return is a briskly paced hour and 40 minutes without credits that never slows down long enough to really get boring. Director D.J. Caruso (Disturbia, Eagle Eye) and Ant-Man and Titanic cinematographer Russell Carpenter give Return an action movie sheen that is at the same time familiar and a bit generic. So it goes with the film. By eschewing the awkward, dated extreme sports references of the original for the most part, what we’re left with is an action movie. It’s a mostly fun, kind of dumb, reasonably entertaining action movie, but one we’ve certainly seen before, particularly from Diesel himself. Did we need another xXx movie? No, probably not. But if you’re into that sort of thing, you’ll have a good time, albeit an all too familiar one, with xXx: Return of Xander Cage.
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-Mike Stec