K-SCORE: 8
Director: D.J. Caruso
Writer: F. Scott Frazier
Starring: Vin Diesel, Donnie Yen, Deepika Padukone, Kris Wu, Ruby Rose, Tony Jaa, Nina Dobrev, Toni Collette, Ariadna Gutierrez, Hermione Corfield, Ice Cube, Samuel L. Jackson
Spoiler Level: As much as I could, not a lot
“equally effective as a narrative as it is fertilizer”
I didn’t understand xXx: Return of Xander Cage because it wasn’t in English. I’m not sure what language it was in, probably Chinese, possibly Thai, but it definitely wasn’t English. I’ve been suggesting for a while that they subtitle all of Vin Diesel’s lines even in films where the script is written in his native tongue: mumbled monkey-speak. They might not have been able to do that for xXx: Return of Xander Cage though because there might not have been a script with which to work.
It’s refreshing to watch an action film of this caliber because it reminds me of how much worse these stories can be from your run-of-the-mill bad ones like Olympus Has Tanked, Die Hardester, or Terminator: Rise of the Resident Evil Surfer. The return of the long-missing Xander Cage doesn’t beg the usual question or present the usual plot holes because no effective narrative is ever established. The best I got in terms of conflict can be summarized as: satellites are crashing to Earth. Someone should really tell F. Scott Fitzgerald, I mean F. Scott Frazier, that satellites crash to Earth semi-regularly already and that it’s not at all a concern. They never hit anything on account of Earth’s enormity and even if they did they wouldn’t do much damage because compared to other astrological bodies they’re moving slowly and aren’t very large. But that’s the most sophisticated I can make any analysis of this premise. I understand nothing else.
“something made of ice shows up and blows villains up with a grenade launcher towards”
Xander Cage teleports randomly between fictional islands and Detroit, though he does frequently show up in planes that never take off nor land, so that he can jump out or throw other people out. He recruits an essential team of allies including a lesbian sniper, a DJ, and a driver whose claim-to-fame is that he’s been in 200 car crashes. They assist him by battling with and against Asians. (Hmm. Thought there’d be more to that sentence.) At one point they toss live grenades back and forth. Several times the DJ hijacks a DJ booth and starts bopping his head. Once Xander infiltrates a futuristic swimming pool club filled with laptop bitches that are very busy until they’re commanded by a twenty-year-old girl to all have sex with him. The implications of an 8-way orgy in a PG-13 action film are very strange. Something made of ice shows up and blows villains up with a grenade launcher towards the end, though how he determined good guy from bad guy is a mystery given that the bad guys were good guys moments before their firefight and the thing made of ice wasn’t privy to those “conversations.” And Samuel L. Jackson appears in the final scene, attending his own funeral missing a lens to his sunglasses.
This film is so very much not for me, an American who has seen more than five movies in his lifetime, that it really never should have wound up on my TV screen. They cast a Chinese action star to play a counterpoint to Vin Diesel, Tony Jaa, some kind of popular Asian DJ, Neymar playing himself, and a Bollywood star to draw exclusively foreign audiences. The entire production was focused on giving you the most amount of moments and characters that fifteen-year-old urban Chinese children would find cool. The result of this filmmaking is so disastrous that I’ve had to come up with weird metaphors and descriptions to attempt to describe its ineptitude. It’s like a child trying to complete one of those simple shape puzzles by bashing the triangle block over and over again into the circle hole. It’s like someone hired a contractor to build a house and instead of building that house, the contractor went to the beach with a pail and shovel and had a temper tantrum. If you were given all of this films scenes without sound and then given separate audio tracks that supposedly match to those scenes, it would take you a hundred hours and a professional lip reader to accomplish the task of piecing it together. xXx: Return of Xander Cage is equally effective as a narrative as it is fertilizer. The film should have a warning label that reads: watching when unaccompanied by the sarcastic can cause serious injury or death.