Movie Review: xXx (2002)

Vin Diesel's infiltration of Code Redd Net continues this week with one of his earliest star vehicles, the beautifully idiotic xXx.

What if James Bond was, like, into motocross and stuff? Well, here you go: xXx is perfect if you ever wanted to see a secret agent bust drug cartels while doing superman seat grabs. Vin Diesel plays an extreme sports exemplary and all-star faux-renegade, recruited by the NSA to infiltrate some Eastern European gangsters. He does all the things Bond does, but does them to the tune of early aughts nu-metal. How do we know he can shoot a gun? Because he broke his leg once pretending to be Matt Hoffman, and spent a few months playing first-person shooters, at least that's what he claims. Obviously, xXx goes for that coveted young male demo by washing every spy movie plot point down with Red Bull: he gets his gadgets from a nerdy white guy who follows him around like an obsessed fan (resulting in one of the all-time great screen grabs*), his globetrotting is limited to places where he can find some rad powder or surf, his language is as colorful as PG-13 allows, he seems to prefer strippers over supermodels, and all the upper-middle-class spoils enjoyed by 007 (Beluga caviar, Vodka martinis, BMWs/Astin Martins) get swapped out for lower-class equivalents, your Playstations, Vans sneakers, Corvettes.

*I love everything about this photo.

As I may have already indicated, it's impossible not to read xXx alongside or against the Bond film from the same year, Die Another Day, one of the more schizophrenic and bloated entries in the series. Whereas DAD had plenty of poorly conceptualized and executed CGI sequences, xXx has aged much more gracefully in that department. Though often implausible, the motorcycle/snowboard chases come across quite clearly, and they make sense in their own stupid way. Similar scenes in DAD don't work because the digital Surfing Bond is so obviously phony: xXx, however, has the good taste to hire a few X-Games athletes as stuntmen to give the scenes weight. It's also easier to stomach Diesel's admittedly insipid one-liners than the nonsense innuendos of Pierce Brosnan and Halle Berry. Strange to say, but with a decade's perspective, it's clear that xXx did what DAD did that same year, and did it better.

Wednesday Double Feature: The Avengers (2012) and Cabin in the Woods (2012)

I went to these movies on consecutive nights (midnight release for Avengers, Friday night for Cabin in the Woods) so I'm grouping them together for a few quick reviews:

The Avengers (2012)

I talk a whole lot about spatial clarity on this blog, especially in regards to modern action movies. Continuity editing, that most common style of editing in narrative filmmaking, which seeks to make the surroundings and full movements of the characters legible (and, hopefully, enjoyable) to audiences, has been lost to a new style where fast, discontinuous, and ultimately confusing cuts signify the action alone, not the actual, physical goings-on. Thankfully, Avengers is  a straight-forward, clean action movie, one that's exciting without inducing headaches. Sure, the plot is the usual Marvel nonsense, but the special effects sequences are fantastic and logically organized. This is the kind of blockbuster I can always get behind.

Cabin in the Woods (2012)

Now this was something of a surprise. Indeed, I had heard absolutely nothing about this one going in to the theater. Matter of fact, just going by the title, I fully anticipated a wholly conventional horror flick. Not that I would've minded, but I was pleasantly surprised by what I got to see instead. Cabin is the epitome of the post-modern, hyper-reflexive genre film. What starts out in the most typical fashion (five dumb kids take a trip out to the mountains to get friendly with each other) becomes more Charlie Kaufman than Friday the 13th. What you get is one of the most original, surprisingly brainy movies so far this year.