XXX

Let me put this in perspective with a perfect “break-out” quote that the studio is more than welcome to attach to its advertising : Made me wish I was watching The Country Bears again! It’s loud, stupid and tedious. And if director Rob Cohen had his way, it would have been even louder. The film was sent to theaters with a letter from Cohen asking them to pump up the volume to 7.0. Considering the standard for the auditorium in which I saw XXX is 4.5, it should be obvious that we’re talking bleeding-from-the-ears loud. My suspicion is that Cohen is all too aware that something is needed to keep viewers awake during this filmic monstrosity — and it didn’t matter to him if we all suffered hearing loss in the bargain. What we have here is an utterly classless James Bond variant. Cohen has shaken — not stirred — the ingredients of the Bond formula, and instead of producing a dry martini has come up with something like a bottle of Thunderbird. And the film is all built around the mystifyingly popular Vin Diesel (nee Mark Vincent) — an “actor” who combines the voice of boxer-turned-character-actor Frank Moran with thespian skills that make Der Arnold look like Olivier. From the moment he delivers his Schwarzeneggerian one-liner, “All right, I’ll turn the music down!” when a gang of secret agents burst in on his party to capture him, you get a feel for just how bad this is going to be. I’ve heard Zeppo Marx deliver a line with more assurance. His ineptitude will doubtless be shrugged off as part of his “charm,” much in the manner that Schwarzenegger’s early non-acting was. Whatever you call it, it’s still just bad acting. The vehicle in which he has arrived this time is probably suited to his talents. Mr. Diesel — with his shaved head, myriad tattoos and biceps the size of redwoods — plays Xander Cage, an “extreme sports” enthusiast with an apparent penchant for teaching persons not in accord with his notions (principallym that extreme sports and video games are the path to enlightenment and a substitute for education) object lessons. As the film begins, he steals a congressman’s Corvette and proceeds to wreck it to teach the legislator a lesson. It occurs to no one that such behavior only gives weight to the congressman’s viewpoint. That doesn’t matter, of course, since this is merely the set-up for why NSA man Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson) is going to recruit Cage as a spy. (No one said this was going to be believable.) And even that doesn’t really matter, because none of this is more than an excuse for one-liners, leering PG-13 sexuality (the movie hasn’t the nerve to cross that PG-13 line and lose its horny-14-year-old male target audience), ever more ridiculous stunts, elaborate explosions and undistinguished rap-metal soundtrack. I can’t say that its big action scenes are necessarily bad, though the film’s snowboard and snowmobile set-piece (ripped off from the Bond flick, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) is a riot of bad continuity and even worse physics. It’s never clear how much of XXX is meant to be taken as a straight spy thriller and how much of it is spoof. I’m reasonably sure that Cage’s first NSA test is supposed to play amusingly on the framing story of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Beyond that … is the ending supposed to be funny? The absurd image of Vin Diesel (whom one might reasonably think could be defeated by attempting to drive a stick shift) atop this goofy looking submarine gamely disarming it so that it won’t destroy Prague certainly struck me as funny. (It doesn’t help that the submarine looks like a rejected design from the ’60s spy spoof Casino Royale.) My guess is that it’s supposed to be thrilling. The only thrill I got from it was the knowledge that the movie had to be almost over. Frankly, both Austin Powers in Goldmember and Spy Kids II — the spoof quality of which make XXX look even more absurd in its apparent seriousness — worked better as spy flicks.