During months swamped with high-brow award contenders, action films can often serve as a fun and mindless escape, but even with that sentiment in mind, “xXx: Return of Xander Cage” is not worth the watch.
“xXx: Return of Xander Cage” is the third film in the “xXx” action franchise. Directed by D.J. Caruso, the movie furthers the story of Triple X, a team of covert extreme sports enthusiasts organized by the National Security Agency. Vin Diesel does indeed return as the titular Xander Cage, after not appearing in the second film.
A mysterious weapon known as Pandora’s Box shakes the intelligence community after it is used to hack into a satellite and tactically hurled toward Earth. Pandora’s Box is quickly stolen by terrorists, and Jane Marke (Toni Collette), head of the NSA, finds the thought-to-be-dead Xander Cage to track it down.
Diesel’s work in Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” and the more recent “The Fast and the Furious” movies have proven him an adequate, though not phenomenal, actor. His return as Xander Cage, fifteen years after the original “xXx” film, calls this credibility into question.
The writing is truly atrocious, even for a big-budget action film, and Diesel’s performance does little to help. He delivers his shoddy lines with little to no inflection, and he looks bored with his work at times.
Perhaps the only worse performance in the film is that of Toni Collette, who sounds as if she’s reading her lines for the very first time and doesn’t quite know where the sentences stop. Her lines as a top-ranking NSA official border on parody, but each one is spoken with complete seriousness.
Cage quickly puts together his own team of xXx agents for the job, a hand-picked combination of killers and specialists who are laughably one-dimensional. Nicks (Kris Wu) brings nothing more to the team than an ability to fire a handgun and his apparent prowess as a disc jockey.
Adele Wolff (Ruby Rose) is a proficient sniper that seems intent on doing nothing more than making cocky or sexual remarks. Despite the film’s best efforts, her dialogue is weak and stifled, masked behind her sometimes indiscernible accent.
Tennyson Torch (Rory McCann) rounds out Cage’s team. A rugby-playing vehicles expert, Torch barely gets enough screen time to disappoint. This is especially discouraging, considering McCann’s phenomenal work as The Hound on HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”
The team soon discovers that Pandora’s Box was in actuality stolen by a separate Triple X group led a man named Xiang. Donnie Yen, of recent “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” fame, brings some of his signature fighting techniques to the role. Yen’s acting is subpar, largely due to the script, but he clearly shines as the most adept martial artist on screen.
It’s a pity that so much of the fighting between the two groups is unbearably uninteresting. Ideas that may have sounded exciting on paper fail in execution. Many scenes overstay their welcome, lasting far longer than they have any right to.
More than once, “xXx: Return of Xander Cage” attempts to make statements on politics and offer commentary on national security and privacy rights. However, the messages fall on deaf ears. There is no place for nuanced discussion in a film that five minutes before showed its hero taking a dozen women to bed.
The film does pick up in its third act with a long and enjoyable action scene. The fighting is notably more exciting and the stakes are raised. The two Triple X teams join forces against a common enemy, and seeing the stars punching and shooting their way around each other does provide some satisfying moments.
This lengthy action sequence, which takes place simultaneously in a warehouse and on board an airplane, is the high point of the film simply because it contains the fewest spoken lines. Diesel and Yen are allowed to be the action stars they are, and the scenes they share are undeniably the best.
A well-placed and genuinely surprising cameo helps to make the last third of the film at least fun to watch, unlike so much of what comes before it.
However, these final moments do not redeem “xXx: Return of Xander Cage” in any significant way. It’s still a below-average film, and it’s hard to justify spending time, let alone money, on it.
Plenty of other recent action films have the same number of guns, cars and girls as this film, and nearly every one of them uses those elements in a superior way. The film lacks any redeeming artistic qualities and, because of that, is hardly worth much consideration at all.
