dvd reviews

XXX
Columbia TriStar ($27.96)

Director Rob Cohen wastes none of his audience's time getting into the action of XXX, so we'll waste none of your time with drawn-out introductions or angles or clever remarks. We've decided to model the following after the structure of XXX itself, so that there will be no questions as to what Cohen's relentless, pounding masterwork is all about. Thus, the review:

CHARACTER INTRODUCTION!!!! VIN DIESEL!!! VIN'S MUSCLES!!! VIN IS A GIANT BADASS WHO WON'T TAKE NOTHIN' FROM NOBODY, DAMMIT!!!

PLOT SYNOPSIS!!!! TOTALLY EXTREME PLOT SYNOPSIS!!!
MORE PLOT SYNOPSIS!! WITH LOTS OF ACTION VERBS AND PRECIOUS FEW ADJECTIVES!!!

SOME CRITIQUE, BUT NOTHING TOO ASTUTE, AND STILL PLENTY OF ACTION VERBS!!!

PRAISE! PRAISE! PRAISE!

STUFF ABOUT THE DVD! TOTALLY EXTREME SPECIAL FEATURES!! ENTER THE XANDER ZONE, SUCKAS!

CONCLUSION.

Ah, we only joke because XXX is a joke, as well. Sometimes it's a good joke, sometimes it loses track of the punchline, and other times it's like when your friend told that one about the dead babies and everyone in the room just eyed one another awkwardly. XXX throws the action genre and the full James Bond filmography into a Ron Popeil juicer and serves us the resulting puree shaken, stirred, and concentrated. Rob Cohen disposes of the pulp that gives action films their front of believability and presents a headache-inducing cavalcade of fire, imploding glass, avalanches, and Vin Diesel one-liners recited with such sneering aplomb it's impossible not to chuckle; that Diesel sounds like he just got a back-alley tracheotomy makes lines like "Welcome to the Xander Zone" even funnier.

An extreme sports daredevil with a definite antiauthority streak to his stunts, Xander Cage lives a bafflingly luxurious life for a guy who doesn't have a job- his various hangers-on, who seem like overeager PA's on some underground Jackass rip-off, videotape their hero while he's engaged in all manner of illegal activity, like driving cars off of bridges. But Xander can't escape the law forever, and his federal payback finally comes in the form of Agent Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson), who offers Xander a clean rap-sheet and no jail time if he'll please just please come work for the NSA as a secret agent. Seems like the bad guys are on to the same old spies, and to breathe new life into a mission that may very well save the world, Gibbons rightly suggests that Uncle Sam employ a crazy devil-may-care lunatic to secure the safety and well-being of the American people.

And so he goes, Agent Triple-X, traveling to Prague to gather intelligence on an underground group called Anarchy 99, which, as XXX finds out, is planning to launch a biological agent upon the world using a superduper computer-controlled submarine. The anarchists, led by grease-ball Yorgi (Martin Csokas), a party-boy by night and WWIII planner by day, accept XXX into their elite clique of similar-minded extremists, which includes Yelena (Asia Argento), a secretive and sullen badass in leather boots.

All this set-up comes after the first act, which focuses on XXX's recruitment, and the dangerous tests he's put through by Gibbons (like being the target of Colombian police helicopter-fire, an action-packed scene that's just a little too long to fit well in the beginning of a film). XXX is an elementary school kid's collage of what an action movie should be- scene after scene of dynamic, explosive action stuck together with characters and plot as thin as one dab from a glue stick. The action is almost fetishistic, as Cohen captures one setup with a dozen cameras, and lovingly extends five seconds into thirty, cutting away and back and to the side and from above and from below, turning a motorcycle jump into a tense, charged money shot. He does this again and again, turning Diesel into the last action hero, and trying, really trying, to turn his kid into a star.

And so and so and so, it seems that Vin Diesel is exactly that, asking $20 million for a movie, and nobody knows why except maybe Diesel and maybe Cohen. XXX, for all the punch it packs, is no 007-he has the balls but not the class, the courage but not the maturity. Cohen blasts the homogenization of the world in one of the DVD's special features, decries the McDonaldsification of humanity, but here is XXX, a character that feeds off the same instincts and desires that drive our very basic consumer needs-sex and money. Cohen, for all his grandstanding, distills with this film exactly what he's supposedly opposing, and feeds it back to us in an easy-to-swallow formula.

This DVD is the closest thing to a Criterion disc that an action movie has ever seen (except, of course, for the actual Criterion releases of Michael Bay's The Rock and Armageddon). The centerpiece is a 40-minute documentary called A Filmmaker's Diary, which follows the 82 days of production from beginning to end, and continues with Cohen as he edits and scores the film. Heads and tails over the normal "documentaries" included on DVD's, this one uses no clips from the completed film, no staged interviews, no obvious studio interference. You end up getting a real sense of why this film was special to the people working on it, which is something you can respect even if the film wasn't particularly special to you. At the very least, it's a nice introduction to the various processes of post-production, an art that very often gets glossed over on DVD's.

Cohen offers commentary on 11 deleted scenes, as well as a running commentary track on the film. The latter finds Cohen switching between nuts and bolts technical information to inflated explanations of character motivation. It feels like he's really reaching to assign some sort of meaning to this film, when he needn't worry himself with such trifles. Rob, you made your meaningful film with The Skulls! Now you can just sit back and watch your new franchise rake in the cash. Homogenization, psshhh-aww!

Again, again, we kid because he deserves it. XXX is knowingly without a brain, so we can't fault the film for that. Truth is, Cohen put together some impressive things in XXX and, when you take the film at face value, which you probably should, it ends up being a not-unenjoyable couple of hours.
-NEAL BLOCK