XXX (2002)
Xander Cage, AKA XXX, is James Bond, dumbed down and oiled up. While James Bond wore tuxedos, XXX wears sleeveless shirts to show off his big muscles. Bond flashed his intelligence; XXX, his tattoos. Bond mingled with the upper echelon of society; XXX hangs out at his pad with Tony Hawk, Mat Hoffman, and Rick Thorne. Bond had a million gadgets at his disposal, XXX has that many bullets.
Xander Cage is basically James Bond, without the class.
And so, for the X-Games Generation, comes XXX. Samual Jackson plays facially-scarred Agent Augustus Gibbons, an employee of the NSA who is tired of having his undercover agents removed from their positions in body bags. Gibbons develops a plan; capture the best and the brightest of the underworld and put them to work for him. His best bet to date is a young recruit named Xander Cage, dubbed XXX (as in, he’s about to go to prison for his third strike).
After running XXX through some pretty unbelievable tests (eliciting some pretty unbelievable responses), Cage is unleashed into the underground world of loud bands, fast cars, and anarchy; Anarchy 99 that is, which is a group of individuals who … well, blah blah blah, who cares, they’re bad guys, Cage is undercover, and guess what, there’s gonna be a whole lot of shooting, fire, car chases, skydiving, snowboarding, and more.
What XXX lacks in brains, it makes up for in action. Unfortunately, some of those action scenes are pretty few and far between. Cage shows all of his X-Games moves, whether it’s doing a railslide on a lunch tray, outrunning an avalanche while on his snowboard, or parasailing behind a torpedo hauling ass through a downtown river.
The action scenes go by so quickly that you don’t really have much time to think about how silly or crazy they were until afterwards. Fortunately, so does the movie, and after it’s over the whole experience kind of washes out of your brain like a hazy dream.
In fact, I can’t even remember if I even saw it now. Oh well.
Perfect for those who found the Indiana Jones trilogy “too slow moving” and “too complicated.”