XXX 2

XXX: State of the Union (Director: Lee Tamahori)

Tamahori hit the scene with Once Were Warriors, then came the awful Mulholland Falls (a movie that often gets confused with Mulholland Drive). Then he made my favorite of his in The Edge. He did the Kiss the Girls prequel Along Came A Spider and then did one of the worst Bond flicks ever in Die Another Day.

You can see why Lee Tamahori was selected to direct the latest XXX movie. After Die Another Day entered James Bond into a world of sheer impossiblity and ludicrous action, why not attach him to a franchise that was inherently anti-Bond? The original XXX was completely over-the-top, changing the Bond model from suave and intelligent to a testosterone-fueled gun and tech freak--Bond's id taking over on the job. It was ridiculous, but hey, it was fun to watch.

Here, holy crap is this ridiculous! First off, Ice Cube becomes the new XXX, since Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson reprising his role) wants a man who is even more off-kilter than the first. The need for the new XXX, a man who is a criminal and has "three strikes" against him in prison but has awesome military prowess and will do anything to get a job done, comes about after Gibbons' dark-ops lair is discovered and attacked with high-tech weaponry "10 times advanced compared to what the NSA has." Gibbons seeks out an old military buddy in Darius Stone (Cube) to figure out who attacked and why. Of course, it's another former military buddy and now Secretary of State George Deckert (Willem Dafoe, in his Speed 2: Cruise Control villain mode), who has plans to kill everyone from the President down to ensure that he becomes President, so that he can then take over military operations and wage a more offensive war campaign. Meanwhile, NSA agent Kyle Steele (Scott Speedman) hunts for Gibbons and Stone, and since he obviously can't be the bad guy, eventually joins up with them.

No one really can be trusted within the government, so XXX twice suggests in the movie that the only ones who can be are carjackers from the 'hood, led by Zeke (Xzibit) and recently-turned-legit-former-girlfriend Lola (Nona Gaye). This is where the rides are acquired, all tricked out in a "Pimp My Ride" sort of way, for gangsters at least. Also, guns are acquired through jacking commercial trucks with drivers who have no idea they are porting guns. If you think all of that's super-ridiculous--well, you haven't really seen where this movie prepares to take you.

At one point, Willem Dafoe is talking to a man (I won't reveal the identity) and is basically hashing out his entire plan for getting away with his assassination. I can't help but think that Dafoe probably laughed a few times during these takes because his plan is so impossibly ludicrous and unnecessarily complicated that the script had to have been written by a teenager. The script is written by newcomer Simon Kinberg, who is about to get an onslaught of opinion on his skills--he has two more high-profile summer movies in Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Fantastic Four coming up, and he's also writing on X-Men 3. What I find most interesting about Kinberg is that he was the script doctor for Elektra and over-the-top favorite Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle.

But wait, the movie hasn't truly zoomed off the cliff until it reaches its finale, in which a speeding train, a sports car with steroids, a helicopter, and lots of weaponry collide into what may make the Hall of Fame in head-slapping moments in film. A CGI-fueled, impossible-even-on-accident series of feats occurs during this. I didn't mind it for sheer fun, but your overload switch is going to blow during this. Your mind will enter into a 4th dimension trying to comprehend reality.

On that note, I can't really recommend it--the movie is pretty darn awful. However, if you just want to watch a tremendous wreck on screen, it's there for the taking, and no cops will tell you "Nothing to see here, move along."