PS3 Review: Wheelman (2009)

Much like Driv3r on the PS2, Wheelman is an adorably stupid game. Maybe Wheelman isn't stupid so much as it is really weird. It's a fairly typical Grand Theft Auto clone, starring Vin Diesel and set in Barcelona, that has some odd ideas about people and physics. It can often be frustrating and confusing, but once you get used to its peculiarities, Wheelman is kind of a charming game.

Basically, Wheelman is about an undercover agent named Milo working in Spain, tasked with disrupting and eliminating smugglers. He's given free reign by his handlers to infiltrate Barcelona's criminal organizations. While the plot is certainly not complex, it can still be confusing if you have any mind for remembering things. There's just too many poorly defined characters and vague alliances to keep track of, and there's no mechanism in the game for recapping past events, not even something as simple as character bios. However, if you just tune out the story, Wheelman is much more enjoyable.

In Wheelman, you do two things: shoot and drive. Mainly, though, you drive, and sometimes while you drive, you shoot too. For the most part, this driving is handled well. What makes the driving in this game unique is its capacity for combat. Steering is controlled with the left analog, while the right analog is used for fighting off enemy vehicles: for instance, pushing the right analog to the right while driving will result in the car dashing in that direction to ram into a pursuer. This can be done in any direction. When a car's "health" becomes critical after three or more wallops, another one will result in that car exploding in a very pretty fireball. In addition, you come equipped with an "adrenaline" meter on the bottom left corner of the screen that you can fill by driving fast, performing risky stunts and jumps, and so on. While a full adrenaline meter can power a short nitros boost, it can also enable several "focus" shooting techniques, which allow you to shoot out the tires or engine of a pursuer in slo-mo. Altogether, these techniques make Wheelman's car combat surprisingly deep and enjoyable.

Outside of the vehicle, however, combat is rudimentary. It works, but far less spectacularly than the vehicle combat, and without the benefit of being luridly amusing. Milo is difficult to control, either sprinting full-tilt like an idiot or waddling around while crouched behind cover. Aiming is actually far too easy, and in general these sequences are tedious and unchallenging slogs between drives.

Wheelman's graphics are nothing special either. Though the cars look nice, Diesel's cyber-scanned mug is incredibly creepy, and the rogues gallery seems culled from Central Casting's racial caricature cheat sheet. Like the graphics, the music is similarly bland. Yet Wheelman is commendable simply for the sheer weirdness of it all. Wheelman's Barcelona is not the abstract, glitchy playpen of Driv3r, but it's still a digital city with a unique understanding of gravity and law enforcement. Cars careen into each other and off ramps as if on Mars, men fly when ejected from a vehicle, and police respond like rabid dogs to a dislodged street light. There's also a series of side-missions and mini-games that ensure that very few normal things happen. Wheelman is like a Grand Theft Auto arcade game and is particularly suited to those who want the experience of an open world game, but without the fuss of exploration.

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.

Movie Review: Fast & Furious 6 (2013)

Despite my evergreen enthusiasm for trashy action movies, this is my first encounter with the Fast & Furious films. I more or less managed to ignore them for the last 12 years: but mid-afternoon boredom, coupled with a few decent reviews and a respectable aggregate score on Rotten Tomatoes, prompted me to give this one a chance. And, for the most part, I was glad I did.

One of the more plausible sequences, for real.

As a rule, franchises don't mature easily. Except for James Bond, most either limp into their toddler years and/or slowly embrace the starless and cash-strapped straight-to-video market. Yet here we are with Fast & Furious 6: more expensive and star-studded than ever despite being old enough to start kindergarten. To its credit, this is one series where prior knowledge of the previous movies is practically unnecessary. In fact, it may actually be beneficial. Just know that Vin Diesel plays a former ex-con street racer done good, a regular Robin Hood with hydraulics, and his merry band of thieves includes buddies like white boi Paul Walker, Tyrese, Ludacris, Sung Kang, Michelle Rodriguez, and Jordana Brewster. In their last adventure, our gang toppled a capitalist's empire and made off with the loot, scattering across the globe to enjoy the good life. Dwayne Johnson plays a super buff military man in need of Diesel's assistance: turns out one of the crew has seemingly returned from the dead to work for a smuggler, and for some reason INTERPOL desperately needs the help of these street racers and import fanatics to take him down. They agree in exchange for amnesty and full pardons, naturally.

Thankfully, there's little time wasted in developing the story beyond that. Johnson shows up in the first 10 minutes, gives the group their marching orders, and then off they go into a world of CGI-fueled chases and car hops. For the first hour of the film, I was very pleased with this breakneck pace. Extended, expertly planned, gravity-defying driving sequences make the time fly right by, even though the artificiality of the special effects is sometimes too transparent. They are bracketed by necessarily exposition-laden scenes that at least have the good taste to be funny, and even if it's mostly childish humor (a recurring bit centers on the size of Tyrese's forehead), it's a welcome thing indeed to see a movie so aware of its stupidity and willing to exploit it. Speaking of which, there are some chase sequences in here that should be kept forever in the annals of excessive movie stupidity, particularly the entertaining tank heist near the end that features more than a single instance of Superman-style carjacking, a thoroughly impractical method that is intellectually and kinesthetically pleasing. Unfortunately, a tepid, hammy Act II really slows the pace down with plot, of all things, but once that's out of the way, it's right back to cars fighting much bigger vehicles in all kinds of wacky, unexpected situations. For summer popcorn, this is a good time.