xXx: The Return of Xander Cage

It’s been a long time since Xander Cage (Vin Diesel) flexed his tattooed neck muscles and effortlessly bounded off an exploding vehicle in mid-air. Fifteen years, to be exact. There have been six Fast and Furious movies and three Riddick films made in the interim – not to mention a couple other notable world events.

Xander is back in the Zone (Xone?) — bigger, better, more tatt’ed and xXx-treme than ever! But it’s not the usual N.S.A. handler, Alexander Gibbons (scar-faced Samuel L. Jackson) who comes knocking at Xander’s door. Instead, Xander’s down-skiing-through-a-jungle shenanigans are met by the cold-stone glare of one blonde-haired federal badass named Jane (Toni Collette). She coolly ropes the criminal daredevil back into helping the U.S. government track down “Pandora’s Box,” some kind of precious boxy device capable of launching innumerable military satellites that can scorch the earth, among other world-destroying properties.

Xander must hunt down a group of unknowable assailants who are as fast and deadly as he is. But to get there, he needs a crew, and the military hot-shots assigned to the operation simply won’t do. The new xXx team consists of sniper expert Adele Wolff (Ruby Rose), stunt-driver Tennyson “The Torch” (Rory McCann) and “Nicks” (Kris Wu), a D.J. who I suppose has some lethal record-scratching skills up his sleeve or something.

In an unsurprising twist, the baddies have exactly the same exXxtreme background and messy, complicated, pro-anarchic feelings about working for The Man as our xXx crew. Xiang (Donnie Yen), Serena (Deepika Padukone) and Talon (Tony Jaa) ain’t nothing to mess with. The movie is mostly structured around set-pieces that highlight their individual skills and charms. There’s the martial-arts finesse of Yen and Jaa, who each get to shine in individual scenes, twisting motorbikes and oncoming cars into beautifully choreographed moves as if the mega-ton hunks of dangerous metal are mere dance props.

Rose’s snarky humour makes a strong presence, supplemented with on-the-nose punchlines about her sexual orientation by Becky (Nina Dobrev), an awkward cute girl in glasses who replaces the dorky Q-like tech-support agent Toby (Michael Roof) from the last two films. Then there’s Padukone’s stink-eye. Being an action film geared towards the bro demographic, there’s no lack of male-gazing close-ups on the female form, but kudos to the xXx producers for making the film multinational and diverse (perhaps the Chinese funding played a role).

It’s not long before the teams are working kind-of together to defeat common enemies. This is where xXx 3 gets interesting, particularly for a 2017 film reviving a silly franchise as old as the millennium. xXx has long championed anarchy. In the original, Xander had no choice but to help the N.S.A. His character’s devil-may-care attitude was based as much on an apolitical penchant for thrill-seeking as it was on a holier-than-thou attitude towards the rich and corrupt.

His successor in the sequel State of the Union, Darius Stone (Ice Cube), was of similar mind. The series’ conspicuous disregard for white collars dovetailed beautifully with the “f—k the police” attitude that a hip-hop icon like Ice Cube brought to the series.

In The Return of Xander Cage, the anti-establishment quips come fast and furious: “There are no more patriots — just rebels and tyrants,” says a reluctant Xander to his new, Hillary-styled boss. Or as one underground hottie tells Xander the muscle-y maverick, “I used to think you were the man, until I realized you were working for The Man.”

For a film franchise that is, in the words of the late Roger Ebert, more “theatre of the absurd” than “action thriller,” such political acuity makes The Return of Xander Cage that much more fun and hard-hitting, especially in this day and age when fewer and fewer people trust even their own governments to do the right thing.

The film’s focus on team-building then, makes a lot of sense, instead of being a direct rip-off of the Fast and Furious and Avengers movies. If the film posits all bad guys are in uniform, the only people left to be the heroes in xXx are the daredevil crazies who have perfected the art of skateboarding, snowboarding or stunt-driving into canyons while escaping from burning airplanes, and having sex, getting new ink, and making a new eardrum-killing Spotify playlist, all at the same time.

Perhaps outlaws as cool and attractive as Deepika Padukone and Ruby Rose are our best, last hope for the future. So let’s cheer them on when they take a selfie after their 200th crash. They deserve it. As long as they can still squeeze in time to save the world.

Originally published in The National Post (January 19, 2017).