xXx (2002)
Directed by Rob Cohen
Xander Cage is your standard adrenaline junkie with no fear and a lousy attitude. When the US Government "recruits" him to go on a mission, he's not exactly thrilled. His mission: to gather information on an organization that may just be planning the destruction of the world, led by the nihilistic Yorgi.
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13 films that influenced xXx
What critics say influenced xXx
Take "La Femme Nikita," make her training part of Cage's 'test', and plop the lot onto the hoary plot of "Bad Company" and you've got "xXx."
Plucked from life in prison La Femme Nikita-style, he's a reluctant secret agent whose interests are cool cars, women, and class warfare - in exactly what order is anyone's guess.
Even when X is recruited against his will to work for secret government services, “La Femme Nikita”-style, the movie remains fresh and fun, thanks in part to Sam Jackson’s Gibbons, X’s immediate superior, further proof that Jackson would be perfectly cast as comic book antihero Nick Fury.
Director Cohen has crafted a carefully considered updating of the stale spy-action genre to push it into the 21st Century, and he acknowledges this fact by crediting all the shoulders onto which he's stepping, from James Bond to The Crow, The Great Escape and even The Third Man.
Roof's Agent Shavers might occasionally fall into the trap of being Rob Schneider in Judge Dredd to Diesel's Sly Stallone, but he pulls himself out of it by not only making us laugh, but also by giving Shavers enough humanity to make him more than just a sidekick.
Branding itself as a new breed of secret agent for a new generation, XXX shamelessly borrows from spy movies that have come before it, including its own version of James Bond's Q and Mission: Impossible -type videophone messages from Gibbons outlining instructions for assignment.
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Director Cohen has crafted a carefully considered updating of the stale spy-action genre to push it into the 21st Century, and he acknowledges this fact by crediting all the shoulders onto which he's stepping, from James Bond to The Crow, The Great Escape and even The Third Man.
It comes in the midst of a host of other films with a similar theme, including Bad Company Undercover Brother, The Master of Disguise, The Accidental Spy, and the forthcoming I Spy (even Men in Black started out with this premise).
Like Wes Craven's insulting "Scream," "XXX" gets off on this type of ironic, post-modern screenwriting and direction, culminating in a film that doesn't reinvent the wheel as promised, but steals the wheel and tries to pass it off as its own.
For there to be future installments of XXX, the movie needed to distinguish itself, and Cohen’s blandness hardly assists the asinine script by Rich Wilkes (Airheads!).
Director Rob Cohen (Miami Vice, Daylight, The Fast and the Furious) and screenwriter Rich Wilkes (The Jerky Boys, Beer Money, Airheads) know their target audience and just how to target them.
But whenever the stunts stop and the story kicks in, "XXX" nose-dives into the land of lobotomized screenwriting (by "Airheads" scribe Rich Wilkes) and the movie's facade of adrenaline-cool falls to pieces.
Dumb fun, sure - and in the hands of "Airheads" writer Rich Wilkes, this is dumber than usual - but fun nonetheless.
It's too bad that the actor doesn't have a better script - from screenwriter Rich Wilkes ("The Jerky Boys," "Airheads") - or better work from Cohen ("Daylight," "Dragonheart") behind the camera.
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Director Rob Cohen (Miami Vice, Daylight, The Fast and the Furious) and screenwriter Rich Wilkes (The Jerky Boys, Beer Money, Airheads) know their target audience and just how to target them.
Writer Rich Wilkes, who created the masterpiece known as The Jerky Boys movie, instead makes Xander kill a guy with a cigarette-smoking nemesis and clumsily pronounce, "I told him that cigarettes would kill him" - not exactly the next "Hasta la Vista, Baby".
It's too bad that the actor doesn't have a better script - from screenwriter Rich Wilkes ("The Jerky Boys," "Airheads") - or better work from Cohen ("Daylight," "Dragonheart") behind the camera.
Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious, The Skulls) is the mastermind of this important project, apparently realizing that, not Paul Walker, but Vin Diesel is just the role model our youth need to build themselves into the next Great Generation.
To correct the faults of the seeming lag in the spy genre, director Rob Cohen gives us XXX (read "triple X") and falls into the same trap that plagued his The Fast and the Furious .
This is supposed to be the breakthrough superstar vehicle for the hairless hero Diesel, who helped last year's The Fast and the Furious become the first movie in a while to rekindle the spirit of what tight, speedy and appealingly unpretentious B-movies used to be.
Linking the appeal of their surprise hit The Fast and the Furious with this summer�s infatuation with secret agents, director Rob Cohen and bullet-headed star Vin Diesel reunite for a sometimes jaw-dropping, mostly eye-numbing exercise in explosions and high-speed chases.
If the film attracts motor heads, trailer trash and Vin Diesel sluts in the same way that The Fast and the Furious did, it will have a large amount of very vocal fans.
Like many of his past characters--including Richard Riddick from Pitch Black and Dominic Torreto from The Fast and the Furious --Xander Cage quickly steals the limelight from the film itself.