The Magic Motion Ride: The Movie. Review on XXX Movie

Rob Cohen’s muscle-bound, homo/hetero-erotic posturing of loud-mouth malcontents and their maniacal cohorts takes center stage in his exasperating action extravaganza; the quintessence of box office thrillers, the epitome of summer blockbusters. With bravado and fortitude to spare, Cohen creates a steel and flesh fusion for the masses to indifferently swallow, while reaping from the poor fools the very brains that trigger their film watching capabilities. To tout Cohen’s post-thought, sleeping pill of an action farce as the best gust of summer film offers would be the grossest overstatement to cross a nincompoops mouth in many a year. And if you should hear such an ear-defiling proclamation from that nincompoop I implore you to smack them, hard.

Cohen’s XXX is the biggest piece of frivolous tripe since little fellows like Jerry Bruckheimer and Joel Silver started contending with the production of films in the action realm. It’s self-proclaimed, fraudulent pop-icon trash that serves only to break generation gaps between archetypal James Bond fans and adolescences too disinterested in 007 for the sake of his refined pomposity. It has the confidence of a Bond film but none of the brains or etiquette, not that Bond films are particularly brilliant to begin with, but nevertheless. Its self-indulgent flattery begins approximately with a tagline that reads “A New Breed of Secret Agent”; assuming the role of Ian Fleming, Cohen haughtily reinvents the unnecessary. So in a sense, Cohen bastardizes Fleming’s pop-culture legend with, supposedly, the intentions of bridging gaps and producing a more user-friendly superhuman for members of the highest movie-going demo graph, hence the inexplicable rebirth of Bond as Xander Cage.

James Bond’s loathsome transfiguration is best described as if the polished Brit were filtered through an American ghetto system, mixed with the some chauvinistic machismo and an aggressively extreme take on life, with a final punctuation on an animalistic sexuality, but that’s pretty much similar to the original Bond. Unchanged are most of the characteristics of the Bond realm; the megalomaniacal villain is still thriving, the beautiful and readily promiscuous women are still in abundance, the science-technology geeks still crack tepid jokes while showing off their latest gadgets of mass destruction, and the locations are primarily gothic European. But this ostentatious and mechanical exercise is completely devoid of the intrigue that has become the glue of the Bond series. Instead an exchange is prepared; Cohen adopts the most flamboyantly unattractive elements to be the most obtrusive of his epic actioner, simultaneously creating a film that’s more of a disservice to the spy genre than the spoofing quirks in Austin Powers.

Extreme “sports” entertainer, Xander Cage (Vin Diesel, who has undeniable charisma), with his own Fox Network show that calls for him to steal exotic cars, drive them off a bridge and parachute to victory, finds himself in serious trouble with the law. When Xander is finally caught by those pesky authorities, our hero finds himself the subject of a most bewildering and (at first) incoherent series of NSA tests of survival, strength and bravery. He becomes the pawn in a massive operation orchestrated by an American and Czechoslovakian alliance to stop an underground terrorist group called Anarchy 99.

His superior, Agent Gibbons (a wasted Samuel L. Jackson), has chosen Xander because he believes he’s “the best of the bottom of the barrel” and finds his antagonistic attitude compelling, for some odd reason. And thus, Xander is sent to Prague for an unusual adventure, where he must infiltrate the Anarchy 99 gang, composed of ex-Russian soldiers now irate over their inadequacies as human beings, who live it up with nightclubs and whores galore. Xander is able to successfully gain the leader’s (Marton Csokas) trust and friendship because of his naturalness with scumbags, but unlike Donnie Brasco syndrome, he is not perplexed between choosing the law and his new found friends. In fact, Xander expresses little on screen, aside from the obligatory one-liners, as he blasts and kills almost anything and anyone with ease, apparently because of his extreme athlete nature. Nonetheless, Xander manages to leak a little sentimentality to catch the radiant eye of said villain’s intoxicating girlfriend, Yelena (Asia Argento, daughter of famed horror director, Dario Argento) as the X-man attempts to save the world, from its umpteenth movie terrorist.

XXX loses itself to the nauseating, high decibel mentality that most action films fall prey to, but even still this is excessively overblown and unnecessary. There are moments so grandiloquently superfluous and ear-ventilating that the film transcends its medium and becomes the first Magic Motion Ride: The Movie, an incomprehensible and migraine-inducing chaos. With that said, it should be expected that XXX is the apex of the schizophrenic movie-watching experience; so action-packed that it thrills and franticly bores concurrently. Further discouraging are the obvious and blaring elements that attempt to announce the film as “grungy but contemporarily fashionable” with a congestion of dulled, mainstream metal rock and hyper-kinetic, yet incredibly flavorless, cinematography.

XXX comes after the temporarily entertaining The Fast and The Furious with much more epic prose but less brains and modesty, declaring itself phenomenal with Diesel’s forceful and testosterone-enhanced vibrancy. But this all has been done before, nine hundred times better and nine hundred times in a coherently entertaining style. The promising, grand style of monolithic architecture contrasted with extreme sport imagery is waived for cheap moments of one-liners and gauche, stunt-saturated set pieces. And even when stunts look elaborate and pulse with a minute fervor, the sequences often conclude with an inconceivable ludicrousness, particularly in the final, laughable act. Hopefully it will be known that Cohen merely compiles every cliché into another tiresome, self-congratulatory adventure, though it’s more likely XXX will have the audiences quivering with anticipation and crying for more. Will Cohen feed their ravenous hunger with a series of XXX offerings? Most definitely.