At the dawn of the 21st century, most power struggles were settled less violently, although one in particular—involving violence—was in desperate need of resolution. Arnold Schwarzenegger, once a behemoth the likes of which action cinema had never before seen (and probably will never see again), was in decline. By 2000, Arnold had not made a good movie in over half a decade. The action movie had evolved into a medium populated by real actors. Large men with muscles suddenly found themselves facing cinematic obsolescence, not that most large men with muscles know what those words mean, but still. The situation was fucking dire, my friends. Tom Cruise (Tom fucking Cruise!) was what passed for an action star. A man who could not, by a blind man, be described as either large or muscular.
Enter Vin Diesel. Born Vincenzo Gasolina in a small weightlifting village in southern Sicily, Diesel arrived in America, discovered the aesthetic value of the shaved head, and supported himself as a bouncer while patiently awaiting movie stardom. The road was not without obstacles. Steven Spielberg allegedly cast Vincenzo in Saving Private Ryan, although no one remembers anything about that movie except the jaw-dropping D-Day sequence, the fucktarded script, Barry Pepper quoting scripture, Tom Hanks liking Edith Piaf, and the scene when the Nazi slowly and quietly disembowels Adam Goldberg, so Vincenzo's claims to be in it cannot be verified. Then came Pitch Black, a good movie, about as close to low-budget SF and hard SF as we've seen on a movie screen in some time . . . the only problem is “we” consists of me and those four other people who smoked weed to it. Fortunately, one of those other four people was Rob Cohen, who put Vincenzo in The Fast and the Furious. The Fast and the Furious was fun, but not reeeeeeally an action movie, though the car stunts are fun, and Vincenzo was certainly sufficiently muscular. Action movie or no, it was nonetheless a big enough success to lead to Vincenzo's first legitimate campaign for the throne: xXx.Released in the summer of 2002, xXx could not have been timed better. The power vacuum in the realm of Big, Dumb Movies Where Shit Blows Up had reached a point where the vacuum was threatening to create a singularity that would kill us all. We needed a movie that was big, that was kind of dumb (but not too dumb), and where a whole lot of shit blew the fuck up. We needed a guy who wasn't really that great an actor, with large muscles, to star in this movie. And goddammit we needed it right then.
Behold the glory that is xXx: we open with a man in a tuxedo being chased around what looks like (and is) Prague. Some scruffy dudes with guns are chasing him, but he shows some James Bond moves, and eludes the scruffy dudes . . . but in so doing ends up in the middle of a Rammstein concert. The man in the tuxedo finds himself out of his element to a profound degree, attempting to make his way through the fornicating teenagers, to hear himself think over the sounds of men painted silver breathing fire in German. These attempts are all for naught: the bad guys kill him, and that's that.
Back in the ol' U S of A, a heavily scarred Samuel L. Jackson makes his way into a top-secret intelligence agency HQ, and states his theory that continuing to use operatives like the man in the tuxedo to bring down the anarchist “punks” (now you know better than to go to metal concerts if you're a real punk, young man; if I ever catch you doing that again, go right to your room with no heroin) is bound to end in failure. Samuel L. proposes that they send in low-lives, greaseballs, fuckfaces, shitheads. People, in short, like one Vincenzo Gasolina, esquire.
Enter Vincenzo, portraying an extreme sports star named Xander Cage (whose neck tattoo, xXx, gives the picture its name). He steals the bright red sports car of a douchebag politician (the rear bumper bears the sticker “Skateboarding Is A Crime!”), rigs it with webcams, and growls an anti-authoritarian diatribe extolling the cultural merit of video games, among other things, before concluding with the piece de resistance of this performance art installation, driving the car off a high bridge, transfiguring it into a flaming wreck, while Vincenzo comfortably bungee-jumps to safety.
(Something subtle that I'm mildly embarrassed that I picked up on: Tony Hawk is Vincenzo's getaway driver for the stunt. Yes, the most famous skateboarder in the world, a man worth millions of dollars from his licensed skateboarding video games, the one “extreme sports” star that civilians can reliably name, this is Vincenzo's getaway driver. That one brief shot of Tony Hawk nervously making sure Vincenzo is in the car before stomping the fucking gas and getting the fuck outta there, more than anything that has yet transpired, firmly establishes Vincenzo as a badass of sufficient degree that badasses we previously thought to be supreme still defer to him.)
Of course, party's at Vincenzo's. A half dozen or so extreme sports dudes show up in cameos, paying tribute to the king, and Vincenzo, it must be said, has sufficient swagger to pull this bit off. It is perfectly plausible that he is the emperor of this realm. He's on top of the world. He has to retain a staff of four to walk stooped over making sure his dick doesn't drag the ground. He's—oh, wow, the power just went out and masked men in black rappelled through the windows with machine guns. Party's over! The masked men knock Vincenzo unconscious.
He comes to in a coffee shop, where Vincenzo, being a smart guy, notices a whole bunch of shit awry. When one of the other coffee shop patrons holds the place up, Vincenzo calmly disarms him and puts his foot in the attempted robber's ass. Samuel L. applauds, revealing that the whole charade was a test to see if Vincenzo had It, which he did. Time for him to be knocked out again, for test #2.
Vincenzo and a bunch of other macho assholes wake up on a plane, which lands and drops them off in what appears to be the middle of nowhere in Colombia. Vincenzo, bored off his balls, is convinced that this is just another test with no consequences, so he surrenders to a Jeep full of heavily armed narcoterrorists. Who take him to a big dirty warehouse-type place, and string him up from the ceiling to await the arrival of Danny Trejo and his machete.
Vincenzo displays little respect for Danny Trejo (which would normally be unseemly for a guy playing his first action lead . . . but Vincenzo passes the real test, to wit, still appearing to have balls while appearing in the same frame as Danny Trejo, another very subtle claim to the throne for our Vincenzo) before experiencing his first moment of fear in the movie when he realizes that Danny Trejo has real blood on his machete. Some quick thinking and athletic display of upper body strength results in Vincenzo killing Danny Trejo and having to make a quick exit.
Helicopters start flying around all over the place, hundreds of dudes with machine guns start yammering in Spanish and chasing Vincenzo, who finds a dirt bike with which he tries to get out. Lots of shit blows up (amen) and Vincenzo's stunt double does a lot of really cool shit with the bike, eventually jumping the outer razor wire fence with a gigantic explosion at his back. All that effort, all for naught: Samuel L. and what appears to be the entire US military sweep in and lock shit down.
Vincenzo is miffed that Samuel L. put him and the other shitheads on the plane into such a dangerous situation. Samuel L. counters with a harsh but fair argument: that all Vincenzo's outlaw web hijinks (it would appear stealing politicians' sports cars was but the tip of the iceberg) would merit a long stay in a federal prison. Cue Samuel L. displaying his nonpareil ability to make utterly retarded, banal text sound awesome through sheer force of Samuel L.ness:
You ever watch lions at the zoo? You can always tell which ones were captured in the wild by the look in their eyes. The wild cat. She remembers running across the plain, the thrill of the hunt. Four hundred pounds of killing fury, locked in a box. But after a while, their eyes start to glaze over, and you can tell their soul has died. The same thing happens to a man. Leavenworth Federal Penetentiary is no joke. They'll take a wild man like you and throw him in solitary just for the fun of it. No more mountains to board, no more oceans to surf. Just a 6-by-8 cell with no window and only a bucket to shit in. You can avoid all of that by doing me this small favor.Vincenzo reluctantly grants that favor, going to work for the Shadowy Dudes In Suits With A Large Weapons Budget agency for Samuel L. and soon finds himself on a plane to Prague, entrusted with the task of buying a bunch of stolen cars from the Russian bad guy. Vincenzo meets his Prague PD liaison, who foolishly gives Vincenzo some 'tude, before taking him to the bad guy's nightclub.
Upon arrival, Vincenzo wastes no time swaggering right up to the bad guy and earning his trust by ratting out the Prague cop (which he was not expecting) and discovering that one of the main henchmen is a huge extreme sports fan and especially a fan of one Xander Cage, which pleases Vincenzo greatly, and he spends the night happily getting fucked up with the bad guys and pretending that he doesn't want to fuck some Jesus into Asia Argento, the bad guy's financial officer/arm candy.
Pause for brief discourse on what elevates an awesome action movie over the run of the mill. Truly awesome action movies have original touches. The shit blows up in new ways. The cars chase in new ways. The premise is still simplistic, sure, but it doesn't insult your intelligence (Russian anarchists wanting to nuke Prague? Hey, sure. Because at all costs, in the name of Premier Havel WE MUST DEFEND PRAGUE!) And, especially nowadays, the girl needs to be cool. Girls don't come much cooler than Asia Argento. This was a point of contention with the date I took to xXx: she called me sleazy for finding Asia hot, and I called her an uptight yuppie with no taste for the exotic. I didn't bother to get into the “Hey, she's Dario's daughter” aspect, since uptight yuppies don't know shit about Dario, and in any case she stopped talking to me after I called her an uptight yuppie. Not having to talk gave me plenty of time to sigh over Asia. Just having her around at all keeps xXx from being a generic action picture.
Vincenzo uploads a staggering amount of information about the bad guys to the Agency, which leads Samuel L. to renege on his promise that he'd let Vincenzo go after this one op. Turns out, they've never had anyone get in this deep before. Vincenzo, pissed, growls “Next time you want someone to save the world, find someone who likes it the way it is.”
So he hangs out with the baddies a bit more, flirts with Asia a bit more, stages the murder of his Prague cop contact to cement his cover, and tries to convince Samuel L. to not just send in a sweeper team to kill everyone. In this last, Vincenzo (trying to protect Asia) errs greatly, since the Prague cop gets pissed and rats Vincenzo out to the baddies.
Vincenzo discovers that Asia is an undercover as well, and the two of them team up. The baddies find them out, and Vincenzo has to escape an avalanche on snowboard and blow a bunch of cars up. Asia witnesses the cruelty of the villains, who nerve-gas a room full of scientists for the hell of it; the main baddie laughs uproariously as the poor scientists slowly die.
Vincenzo's gadget guy supplies him with a tricked-out muscle car, in which Vincenzo and Asia pursue the boat the baddies have put the nerve gas bomb on; once it gets to downtown Prague, boom. This necessitates fancy driving, very cool stunts, and the requisite “is he dead? Is there any question more disingenuous in this kind of action movie?” moment for a bit of drama before Vincenzo emerges, victorious but wet. He and Asia run away to the South Pacific where they have, the movie implies, the awesomest sex in the history of sex while Samuel L. tries to get Vincenzo's attention for a new mission. Roll credits. Hell yes.
By rights, Vincenzo should have had the inside track to the throne based solely on this role. A challenger appeared the following year, when The Rock made The Rundown, in which Arnold appears as himself in a club, briefly says what's up to The Rock in a clear-cut “I pass the crown to you” moment. Of course, this means war. Or, more accurately, would have meant war if Vincenzo really gave a fuck. The smart move would have been, one more non-xXx picture, maybe a sequel to The Fast and the Furious, get that franchise going, then another xXx movie. Instead, Vincenzo pulls this “I want to be a real actor” fuckology, refuses to do 2 Fast 2 Furious, refuses to a sequel to xXx, and bizarrely does a sequel to Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick (with like twenty times the budget, that tanked because the four of us who saw Pitch Black weren't much of a fan base; Riddick is okay if you're high, but otherwise utterly tarded).
So Vincenzo took himself out of the game, and they went ahead and made a sequel to xXx without him. I was suspicious, and missed it in the theater (along with everyone else: xXx: State of the Union was one of the most expensive flops of all time), but a while later my mom started insisting enthusiastically that it was actually awesome and that I should see it. I did . . . and lo and behold, it's almost as great as the first one is!
I barely even remember the plot to xXx: State of the Union. I know bad guys break into Langley and machine gun all the “good” guy intelligence agency dudes (considering that going Columbine on CIA headquarters after the Iraq clusterfuck had its appeal as a concept, it took a bit of effort to recalibrate my emotional reaction to this opener) and that Samuel L. and the gadget guy decide, in the wake of Xander Cage's death (fatal “I want more money for the sequel than you're willing to pay”-itis) to get the next best thing to Vincenzo: Ice Cube.
Considering that Ice Cube came straight outta Compton, was affiliated with a gang called Niggaz With Attitudes, and that if you fuck with him, the police are gonna have to come get him off your ass, he's called off with a sawed-off, squeezes the trigger and bodies are hauled off, and so on, this choice makes a great deal of sense. We are, after all, talking of a man whose idea of a good day is one where he needn't use his AK. The only problem is, Cube is in a super high maximum security prison, the kind of place that no one has ever escaped from except in a stupid action movie. Samuel L. Jackson takes advantage of a long and storied career having granted him metanarrative powers of perception, and realizes that they're in a stupid action movie, and springs Cube in a sequence that left Cube's stunt man breathing very heavily.
Once Cube is out, he has to stop Willem Defoe from assassinating the president and assuming power in a coup d'etat (because Willem Defoe is fucking old school, motherfucker). Stopping Willem Defoe involves almost shtupping a white chick, enlisting Xzibit's chop shop to make some tanks, carjacking a couple dudes who were unknowingly transporting a shitload of guns, and generally turning Washington DC into a war zone at the climax, where a heavily tanned, lounge lizard president (picture a cross between George Hamilton, J.T. Walsh, and Rudy Giuliani) narrowly escapes getting got due to the razor-sharp eye-hand coordination of Cube's stunt double. After a (no bullshit) thrilling chase sequence aboard a high-speed train in which Cube's stunt double squares the fuck off with Willem Defoe and unceremoniously sends him to the next life, the natural order of the world is restored, Cube is no longer a fugitive (I think . . . he's either still a fugitive or decides to live the life of an anonymous nomad to set up a sequel that never came) and Xzibit's chop-shop girl loves him.
I would never claim that xXx: State of the Union is not utter and complete bullshit. It's really dumb and effects-heavy, but the effects are pretty good, and in the four scenes in the movie where it's really Cube and not his stunt double, Cube is pretty good (especially when he pulls a fully-realized Southern lobbyist character out of his ass in the scene where he almost shtups the white chick, who turns out to be evil). Willem Defoe is good, because he has a magical ability to overact in shitty movies and not look like an asshole (To Live and Die in LA was a notable exception to this, because he was too young and insufficiently leathery), and Xzibit is quite fun, repeating "If it's got wheels, we can jack it," as a mantra; Cube later welcomes him to "the first tank-jacking in history" (they steal a tank at one point) and Xzibit is suitably respectful of the historical significance.
But, in the end, Cube is not Vincenzo Gasolina. Do not, please, misinterpret this as a slight against Cube. The man is a giant, and in the right picture (Boyz N The Hood, Three Kings) is an extremely capable character actor. But there's something about the way Vincenzo swaggered through that first picture, that immortal, untouchable growling godhood, that Cube can never hope to replicate. Cube acts, Vincenzo merely is. It certainly helped that the script to the first movie was better (Vincenzo had the advantage of timeless text like “Stop thinking Prague police, start thinking PlayStation—blow shit up!”) and in scenes where it was unclear whether Vincenzo was staring off into middle distance trying to remember his lines or trying to look worldly, pensive, and alienated, you could look at the other side of the frame and see Prague.
The difference, in the end, between xXx and its sequel is not great in terms of enjoyment, even if it is in quality. For those moods where you're like “I want to see an action movie with balls,” xXx fits the bill perfectly. For those “I want to see something that kind of sucks but will surprise me at how little it actually, in fact, does suck and actually is kind of good when all is said and done” moods, the sequel fits, though that is, admittedly, quite a nuanced mood, and rarer. Extreme care must be taken to not watch xXx: State of the Union in any kind of wistful mood, as an inevitable sighing “what might have been” regarding Vincenzo's failed bid for the throne may take hold.
Vincenzo Gasolina: the once and (probably not) future king. The throne is still vacant, since The Rock is making kids' movies. And The Expendables looks to be replacing the monarchy with a Politburo: who's the alpha badass among Sly, Arnold, Bruce, Statham, Jet, Dolph, Danny Trejo, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, and Steve Austin (Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts don't count)? We shall see. But we will most likely have to remember kings only in our dreams.
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