XXX
1962 All Over Again
If anyone is keeping track of these things, the James Bond movie franchise is almost forty years old. The first flick in the series, Dr. No, was released in Britain in October 1962, and its release was delayed in this country because of the Cuban Missile Crisis. You could look it up.
Think about 1962 for a minute. Think of everything that was around then that is better now. Computers are better. Dentistry is better. Television is better — or at any rate, there’s more of it. Dr Pepper is about the same, although Coke now comes in that good new vanilla flavor. All sorts of things are better than they were in 1962, with the possible exceptions of the New York Mets, Ursula Andress, and popular music. So why aren’t action movies any better?
XXX is a big, dumb summer action flick that can’t think of anything better to do than mimic old James Bond movies. Of course, since this is a big, dumb summer movie, you need a big, dumb character in the James Bond role. Enter Vin Diesel, who has turned in some promising work in a series of B-movies and is now on the path to the big time. Diesel plays his character, Xander Cage, as a refugee from the X-Games, proficient in skateboarding and dirtbiking and PlayStation and what-have-you. True to form, Diesel balances this attention to the physical by turning off his higher brain functions; it’s rare that we see him speak in anything other than catchphrases. “You’re in the Xander Zone,” is the one we hear most frequently.
To give Xander Cage his credit, he is very physically adept, able to jump from plummeting cars and snowboard down steep mountains. He even upgrades the image of Steve McQueen in The Great Escape — that’s 1963, for those of you who are paying attention — by driving his dirtbike sideways through a barbed-wire fence. XXX is filled with all manner of unlikely stunts like this, and (along with Eastern European hookers in thong bikinis) these stunts are the main source of eye candy in the film.
XXX is this summer’s shallow action movie; its one strength is that it is a quantum leap better than last summer’s uber-wretched Tomb Raider. There isn’t anything about it that shows any grand design other than blowing stuff up and jumping off things. The only hint of gravitas is provided by Samuel L. Jackson, who is criminally wasted as an official at the NSA (No Such Agency) who is Diesel’s manager and who kicks his butt every twenty minutes to keep the narrative going. It’s not silly enough to be fun, either, the only approach that XXX has to irony is that the villain is building a submarine in his basement. In Prague. Which is landlocked. (XXX is counting on that segment of the teenage male demographic that failed geography class, apparently.)
There will be those of you that want critics to give XXX a break that it doesn’t deserve and hasn’t earned. “It’s a popcorn movie,” you say. Or, better yet, “It’s just a roller coaster ride.”
Think about this for a minute. Isn’t popcorn better now than it was in 1962? Isn’t the technology better? Isn’t it tastier? Isn’t the butter flavoring less greasy? (As expensive as movie popcorn is, you’d hope that, anyway.) Roller coasters are definitely better than they were in 1962, aren’t they? Did they have those backwards and sideways and upside-down roller coasters in 1962? Of course they didn’t.
Society has come a long way in 40 years. Our action movies have not kept up. We should demand better. We should demand that action movies keep up with the times. We should demand better scripts, better acting, and better characters. We should demand something else than James Bond retreads (and sequels), and recycled movies from television shows like I Spy (1965), Star Trek (1966), and Mission Impossible (1966). Our action movie sensibility has been frozen like Austin Powers. The worst thing about XXX is that it does nothing to move forward.
To paraphrase the man who was President when Dr. No was released: Let the word go forth from this time and place, to Hollywood and Hong Kong alike, that the torch must be passed to a new generation of action heroes — created in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our action-movie heritage -— and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of the basic human right to a first-class summer movie schedule to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.