I blame January for this. I went and saw xXx: The Return of Xander Cage, and the reason I went to see it is because there is nothing good out to see. Sure, sure the awards movies are out now, but they are all playing at weird times in weird places. That meant the only movie my wife hadn’t forbid me to see without her was xXx: The Return of Xander Cage (FYI the xXx makes it really annoying to type).
According to xXx: The return of Xander Cage there are 30,000+ satellites orbiting the Earth (in truth there are less than 3,000), so when an ‘extreme’ group of terrorists get ahold of a device that can control every one of them and force them out of the sky like giant bombs (satellites are built so that is not possible), only Xander Cage (Vin Diesel) and his ‘dope’ team can bring these bad guys to justice.
If the infuriatingly dumb premise wasn’t bad enough, everyone in this movie speaks in cliché, one liners, or bad soft core porn come-ons, and because of this none of their conversations make any sense. It left me wondering if theses actors were even in the same room when they were filming their lines. Thankfully this meant that most of the dialog was unintentionally funny. Unless they were telling a joke. In which case the jokes fell flat, or at most resulted in a groan.
The actors, with a few exceptions, for some reason really committed to this film, and I think to their detriment. Because trying to be serious in movie like this is not going to work. The three actors who apparently understood what kind of movie they were in were Donnie Yen, Rory McCann and Nina Dobrev. And Nina must have rewritten all her lines because she at times was purposely funny and clever. Donnie and Rory on the other hand just looked like they were having a good time getting paid, and they, with Nina, were easily the best part of this movie.
Now I know what you are thinking, you don’t go to a xXx movie expecting good acting and well written dialog. You go for the action. Well that too was a let down. None of the action scenes made any sense, and most of them were in the movie’s trailers. Then, the first major action scene takes forever happen, and I am going to tell you something very important: If you are standing still in a hallway and Special Forces are firing at you, you are going to get shot. Apparently that is not the case in xXx: The Return of Xander Cage.
I expected this movie to be bad, and it did not disappoint. Though I will say it did have some of that ‘so bad it is good charm’, and I could see getting a bunch of friends together with some popcorn and tearing this film apart MST3K style. There is no doubt that a RiffTrax will be made for xXx: The Return of Xander Cage soon. You should not go see xXx: The Return of Xander Cage, but if you do, bring a friend who is able to see the humor in bad cinema.