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.