There's Too Much Ho-Hum In A Movie Like xXx: Return of Xander Cage That Should Be All Vroom Vroom

He's back. You all thought he was dead but nope, Xander Cage (Vin Diesel) has just been using his extreme sports skills to help poor people in foreign countries get the ability to watch Soccer matches on TV. But it looks like his time off the grid is coming to a close when his former boss, Augustus Eugene Gibbons (Samuel L .Jackson), is killed by a falling a satellite. Jane Marke (Toni Collette) doesn't believe this was an accident, in fact, she knows this was the work of someone tampering with a government device called Pandora's Box, that allows a single person to control any satellite in existence. Obviously, the only way to stop this threat is by making heavy use of Xander Cage's extreme sports skills.


But Cage isn't alone on this mission. He's got a crazy good sniper, Adele Wolff (Ruby Rose), a dude who loves to crash thing, The Torch (Rory McCann) and a guy whose only skill is the on-screen text declaring him "fun to be around", Nicks Zhou (Kris Wu). Together, these four crazy individuals will have to team up with Serena Unger (Deepika Padukone) and Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen) and travel to all sorts of corners of the globe in order to take back Pandora's Box from nefarious forces. Oh, and Xander Cage may have to do some extreme sports stuff too like ride a motorcycle on the ocean, that also happens.

If that all sounds like a recipe for goofy bombastic fun, well there's a couple of individual scenes and moments where xXx: Return of Xander Cage does enter that sort of territory. This is most notable in some of the more harebrained action bits as well as a climactic appearance from a certain character from the second movie that allows Return of Xander Cage to reach its zenith in terms of giddy entertainment. Unfortunately, the rest of the film is just sort of tolerable as far as action movies go with its plot weirdly being ambivalent at grabbing every opportunity it can for potential stylized mayhem.

In a world where the relentlessly inventive John Wick movies exist, the tepid climax, for instance, of Return of Xander Cage just doesn't cut it. For some reason, the entire motion picture concludes with a visually unappealing shootout in a generic looking abandoned building that just comes off as cheap-looking and quickly becomes repetitive while Xander and Donnie Yen's character also take out the movies main adversaries in too quick of a fashion. It's a shockingly boring finale to a film whose best moments suggest it could be something exuberant and special. As if to just rub salt into the wounds, the already boring as h*ck climax doesn't even involve extreme sports in any shape or form! What's that about?? Isn't that like making a samurai action movie and not having the samurai engage in cool swordplay in the climax?

Too much of the rest of the movie has this weird lack of energy to it thanks to some middling directing by D.J. Caruso, a guy more known for small-scale thrillers like Disturbia, and occasionally chopping editing. These two elements have a real knack for zapping the vivacity out of the room and I kept wishing a little more fun could be incorporated into these key areas of the film. A screenplay by F. Scott Frazier that has a tired dud of a one-liner for every genuinely enjoyably cheesy piece of dialogue doesn't help matters and it's a pity that the script couldn't come up with a memorably grandiloquent antagonist for Xander Cage and his buddies to fight since the actual foes of the movie are pretty dull.

Vin Diesel, operating in his lovable tough guy routine from the Fast & Furious movies, is solid in the lead role even if it feels like he's going through the motions too often and the rest of the cast is actually pretty good all around, particularly Ruby Rose, Donnie Yen and Deepika Padukone, those three really own any scene they show up in. Pity they don't have a more consistently fun movie to occupy though, since the best parts of xXx: Return of Xander Cage suggest something that could have been a really off-the-wall thrill ride. Hey, at least we get that gloriously crazy climactic cameo though, that really is a great moment, more stuff like that please if we get another one of these Xander Cage movies.