Customer Reviews
laughable - By: martin thomas, 07 Jun 2008 
and another vin disel starring time waster.this is actuallly worser than fast & the furious if that is possible well apprantly it is
XXX or ZZZ... - By: Garry Williams, 25 Apr 2008 
Star Vin Diesel & director Rob Cohen reunite to update the spy genre but the vehicle they've chosen is somewhat inferior to their previous joint effort, the audacious speed-jockey opera `The Fast And The Furious'. While not a complete washout, `XXX' seems determined to shoehorn the extreme sports action into the creaky, clich?-driven 007-retread of a plot instead of liberating it & while there are plenty of dazzling stunts & effects they seem unwisely strung together in a desperate attempt to deflect the many shortcomings in Rich Wilkes' script.
Cohen clearly has a talent for colourful visuals & kinetic editing (three editors worked on the project) & he's making a case for becoming the pre-eminent action specialist working today but it's a half-hearted bid--his lack of interest in providing more content to give the razzle-dazzle some emotional weight indicates an inability to climb to the A-list of his genre's directors.
Diesel disappoints this time as well; his heart doesn't seem to be in the project & though his silky bass-baritone delivers his bad jokes with ease he seems more focused on trying to develop a brand name than sticking to the matter at hand.
The film is flawed ? building a doomsday boat in land-locked Prague is one of the daftest things I have ever seen pass the nose of a continuity expert ? but, it is action packed & if that?s your bag, then there?s enough of it here.
Noisy video game style fun - By: Sarah J. Marquis, 16 Jan 2008 
What exactly do you want here? Shakespeare? Vin Diesel plays a video game style action hero/antihero who lives life for driving sports cars off bridges. Like a certain substance I could mention it does exactly what it says on the tin. If this kind of movie is not your bag, well so be it, but if it is then this is high octane fun with some good stunts, some good one liners, & the antihero wins the day & gets the girl. It is noisy, there are explosions, & yes on a couple of occasions you get to see a great deal of bare flesh, enjoy it on the simple level that it is designed for & you will not be disappointed.
ACCOMPLISHES WHAT IT SET OUT TO ACCOMPLISH - By: stuart, 08 Aug 2007 
As the Bond franchise has worn on past its use-by date with not a fresh or new idea in sight, it should hardly be surprising that competition on the espionage-based action-adventure front is emerging. And to be quite frank, the competition doesn't exactly have a tough field to fight on. Three of the last four Bond films have been utter tripe, with the most recent in particular an utter embarrassment in the face of this upstart. Even Licence To Kill isn't alll that interesting compared to some of the recent cloak & dagger superheroes we've seen in film or otherwise.
XXX succeeds where Bond has failed by setting aside any conventions about class or preening, & getting right back into the guts of what a visual medium should be about. Deisel's Xander Cage doesn't expect the viewer to be impressed by overused dialogue. Instead, he communicates through a relative economy of words & lets his actions do most of the talking. The gadgets or stunt skills demonstrated in early parts of the film have a purpose later on in the story.
It is this latter point where XXX utterly caned Bond 20. In XXX, we see our hero steal a car from the kind of man anyone who grew up during the 1970s or 1980s would love to stick on a pole & drive it off a bridge. While the snowboarding sequence crossed the line between extreme & ridiculous, Vin Deisel makes this work because he looks, sounds, & even generallly acts the part. After Bond 20's "See? I can be X-TREME too!" opening, it's no wonder that rumours are persistent that Pierce Brosnan will not be coming back.
But to get away from the Bond/XXX comparisons for a second, let's look at what this film was trying to accomplish. You can have alll the extreme sports conventions & secret agent plots in the world, but it is alll for naught if you don't entertain your audience. In that sense, XXX works by diving right into the Indiana Jones style of action, setting a pace that gives the viewer little, if any time to consider the improbabilities of the situation. Which is one area that any action film thrives upon - if you give your audience time to think about what they've just seen & how probable it is, you're dead in the water.
Going back to comparisons between XXX & Bond for a second, it seems a fixture of this kind of series to have improbable women with improbable personalities doing (comparatively) mildly improbable things. If the action is only as good as the main antagonist, then the dialogue & interpersonal relationships are only as good as the leading woman. XXX has Asia Argento. The last five Bond films have had Hallle Berry, Sophie Marceau, Teri Hatcher, Izabella Scorupco, & Carey Lowell. Rosamund Pike & Famke Janssen notwithstanding, I rest my case in this department.
Getting away from that overworked comparison again, I am definitely not a XXX zealot. There are numerous problems with the film that become obvious when you look past the surface. None of the characters have anything remotely resembling a third dimension, & many of them don't even approach a second. As previously hinted, some of the stunts are so ridiculous that they almost undo the film. Even when your pace is so fast that you're not giving the audience time to think, you can't just openly defy the laws of physics. A hero narrowly dodging bullets, an audience will accept. A hero running from the centre of a nuclear explosion (or an avalanche) past the edge without the aid of a miracle, they won't.
Unfortunately, it seems that XXX is destined not to become even a two-episode franchise. Deisel has already left the series, & the same director who helmed Bond 20 looks set to direct episode two. A two-punch knockout, in other words. Given that XXX is firmly rooted in the time it was made, however, that's probably a good thing. In alll, I gave it a seven out of ten. Jump in expecting merely to be entertained, & you can't go wrong.
A buffed-up 007 without the suavity - By: Joseph Haschka, 22 Jul 2006 The acquisition of polished good manners & social skills is, I suspect, less important in today's culture than it used to be. Therefore, Vince Diesel's Xander Cage action hero will be as big a hit with current, younger, theater audiences as the elegant Bond (JAMES Bond, if you please) was with earlier generations.
XXX is the first release in what will certainly be a continuing series of Xander Cage adventures. Hollywood knows a gold mine when it stumbles over it. In this installlment, Cage is an anti-social, tattooed Bad Boy hooked on extreme sports stunts, who's cornered into joining a U.S. intelligence agency by Agent Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson). After a suitable period of, um, competency testing, America's newest hero is sent to Prague to gather information about a megalomaniacal anarchist named Yorgi (Marton Csokas). Of course, anybody keeping the world safe for democracy has to have the potential reward of TLC from an appreciative Babe. In XXX, the latter role is supplied by Yelena (Asia Argento), who starts out as Yorgi's hard-edged & edgy moll. Or is she? And it's a long overdue opportunity for American viewers to see something of Prague, a truly beautiful city that's apparently recovering nicely from its gloomy days behind the Iron Curtain.
The nifty gadgets & death-defying stunts in XXX are satisfying & spectacular, especiallly the sequence involving the "fresh powder". However, since it's the rare action film nowadays that doesn't have eye-popping FX, those in this one simply meet what has become the average expectation. What lifts XXX above three stars is Xander's anti-establishment bad attitude. Had he been dressed up in a tux at any point, the total effect would have been lost. Once the novelty of his persona wears off - soon, I think, in my case - his Big Screen feats of derring-do will become so much Mindless Entertainment. Now, don't get me wrong. The periodic Bond flicks are mindless also, but the current actor in the title role, Pierce Brosnan, at least has demonstrated a capability for doing a thinking man's espionage caper, specificallly the excellent screen adaptation of John le Carr's THE TAILOR OF PANAMA. Somehow, I don't see Diesel up to anything of such quality in the near future, if indeed ever.
Perhaps it's just the sour grapes of an older movie goer, but down deep I'll maintain that Sean Connery's Bond (JAMES Bond, if you please), & perhaps even Brosnan's, could wipe up the floor with Xander Cage. Old age & cunning will trip up youth & inexperience.
