In Which it’s Time to Enter the Xander Xone

In 1995 ESPN brought the world the first X Games. An annual competition to highlight the world of so called extreme/action sports. These were trials of skill that skipped the average sporting fan and cut right into the interests of the younger generations. Gone were the slow motion events of the traditional olympics, and in there place were death defying stunts based around stuff like skateboarding, motorcross, and snowboarding. It was the event for adrenaline junky, a celebration of the wild, reckless, and exceedingly talented. These events helped bring an even greater spotlight to athletes like Tony Hawk and Sean White, and provided them massive influence over the vulture.

In 1998 snowboarding was finally added to the Winter Olympics, and in 1999 the first Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was unleashed on the populace. This steady drip of action sport related media demonstrated that this milieu had great interest and cache with the populace at the time. Especially as pertained to younger individuals who might while away the hours on cable, playing video games, or collecting skate videos from local comic shops.

The late 90’s saw the realm of extreme sports coalesce into quasi-mainstream acceptance, and while there would always be  a strain of individual railing against the punks tearing up the streets with their boards, it became such a zeitgeist that it seemed like an undeniable movement. What’s interesting about the world of extreme sports is that it’s opposition existed enough for it to feel like a legitimate counterculture, while simultaneously being wimpy enough to completely steamroll. Opponents existed as Footloose-esque villains against a thing that was mostly seen as fine. Yes the prudes would stand defiant, but they would never be able to affect resistance at a large scale, so the culture was allowed to flourish.

And as always Hollywood was behind the curb on this one. Movies, with their extended production times and massive wrangling of resources, are always at a tricky place when surfing the wave of other cultural trends in different mediums and fields. Skaters can quickly shoot videos on the streets and send them to friends, while Hollywood has to have a whole apparatus in place to make the big pictures. So even when they finally glom onto something that seems both hip and with it, nine times out of ten it feels like we are treated to another rendition of the “how do you do fellow kids” meme.

Such is the case with 2002’s action sports espionage bonanza xXx. A movie so cool that it will knock your proverbial socks off. It has everything that a youth would enjoy at the time: snowboarding, motorcross, skydiving, Vin Diesel, Nu-Metal, and the ever luxuriant cinematic stylings of director Rob Cohen. If there was ever a movie of the era to so exactly carve out a chunk of cultural amber than xXx belongs in a museum. A perfect preservation of what studios thought would bring a plugged in teen audience to the theater. A production calculated at every level to be “not your daddy’s” James Bond. An action franchise that would piss off the squares, losers, and nerds in equal measure.

While I am arguably a square, loser, and nerd in equal measure I was not pissed off by xXx, but more eye rolling about the whole affair. For as much as Diesel and Cohen try to sell the cool credentials of the film, the whole thing reeks of cheese and awkwardness. A series of scenes that induce more exasperated sighs, mocking chuckles, and groans, than the intended fist pump and cheer that the filmmakers were so squarely aiming for. So while there is some camp qualities to the film, it once again is caught by the terrible trap of being way too much of try hard to sit with the cool kids. What made Tony Hawk and Sean White so admired was the seemingly effortless way that they defied gravity, what makes xXx sink is that the audience can feel the sweat on the brow of the movie trying to make itself beloved by the boarding set.

To whit this movie is an astonishingly shameless riff on the Bond franchise. In a hilarious cold open, a bunch of menacing Europeans murder an American operative at a Rammstein concert (thank you early 2000’s production), before we are shuffled over to the NSA to assess the situation. Augustus Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson) has an idea, instead of wasting good NSA talent on dangerous missions, why don’t they take notorious felons from home and send them abroad, perhaps in some form of suicide squad. So that leads him to Xander Cage, a combo Tony Hawk and malicious prankster who steals the cars of senators to get back at them for trying to ban video games.

Once under the NSA’s employ, Xander heads to Prague to take down the criminal enterprise lead by the amusing named Yorgi (Marton Csokas) who has gotten his hands on some dangerous neurotoxin in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Along the way he romances the ravishing Yelena (Asia Argento) and demonstrates his dexterity at a variety sport themed spy stunts.

While watching this I was struck by how totally, from premise, structure, execution, and action, this is a rip of Bond. Shameless might not be accurate enough. It’s like a magical xerox of a Bond script with the words changed.  From the aforementioned cold open, to the mission brief, to the girl that our spy falls for, to the quips, to the European local. Everything stinks of the franchise that xXx so desperately wants to dethrone. Hell there’s even a Q analog who gives Xander a list of whizz bang gadgets to accomplish his mission.

xXx even has similar issues to the concurrent Bond film of Die Another Day. Sports based action sequences, incredibly ropy digital effects (here noticed in a wonky avalanche that Cage outruns on a snowboard), and a weird fixation on subterfuge that feels like it was pulled from an alternate dimension. This is another story that involves covert ops that willfully refuses to engage with how the world currently is. Instead playing in the short lived fantasy land of post Soviet Eastern Europe, and feeling all the more puzzling for it.

This try hard nature is one of the many reasons that this movie now plays more as camp than anything to be truly thrilled by. It’s free from the shackles of long term franchise making that Bond has to struggle under. So there’s some jovial pieces of inane filmmaking to gawk at without worrying about tarnishing a so called legacy. Maybe it’s Diesel insisting on wearing a giant fur coat for a good portion of the movie, or perhaps it’s the actually quite impressive motorcycle stunts achieved here (though many of them are glossed in some shoddy digital replacement). In the efforts to dethrone 007 there are places for a bad movie watch chuckle. The sheer audacity of a movie having a character un-ironically cheer on the “Xander Zone” as it’s primary catchphrase.

It’s also an important stepping stone in the evolution of Diesel as a movie star. It’s now well known that he is a humongous dork. A famo who is a hardcore gamer and DnD hobbyist, and xXx is the movie where he wants to center those bonafides with his action star charisma. This the third of a series of franchise starters that Diesel appeared in during the early 2000’s, and while Pitch Black and The Fast and Furious (another Cohen joint) are both much more successful films, they still both positioned Diesel as the narrative problem in the movie that needed to be resolved. Xander Cage is finally Diesel unleashed, a representation of all his interests and obsessions allowed to flourish on screen as a singular individual. Cage talks about his skills come from playing first person shooters and perfecting stunts to sell on video tapes. So for as much as xXx is a pander to a specific audience, it’s also an audience among which Diesel has firmly planted his flag.

Still, on the whole, the passion wanes in Cohen’s just monstrous inability to turn the ludicrous elements here into something more worthwhile. Most of the time spent between action is dedicated to groan worthy dialog, a stiff and unexciting romance, and a pounding pressure to keep the cool up at all times. For as good as some the motorcycle stunts are, for as of the moment the look and soundtrack is, it is still a rather tedious affair. Not helped by a rather lugubrious runtime and laughable plot and character machinations. In the moment xXx was a success, but its to obvious long knives for the Bond franchise would actually doom it from being the heir apparent of that series for the decade. And so it stands now mostly as a curiosity of what people understood to be the best way to get the X Games crowd into the movie theater.

Odds and Ends

• It is interesting that all three mentioned Vin Diesel series have continued to this day, but it’s The Fast and Furious, the one he actively dropped out of because he wasn’t the lead, that became the megalith.
• The abundance of Nu-Metal here is truly staggering. Not just the inclusion of your Rammstein’s and Drowning Pool’s, but also an original soundtrack that leans on the aesthetic as well.
• You can cut through the poseur nature of the film by noting this hardcore experience is indeed only rated PG-13.
• While both xXx and Die Another Day made money, it’s notable that their outlandish production styles still slipped through the conscious in favor of Spider-Man and Bourne.
• The Xander Xone is what the 2nd disc of the soundtrack is called.

Next Week: The camera starts shaking as we enter the parkour era with The Bourne Supremacy.