XXX
I don't want what I'm about to say to be interpreted as jealousy, but when I woke up this morning I found that my wife had been up for some time watching the movie 'XXX.'
In an era that has brought us such fine titles as 'Snatch' and 'Blow,' 'XXX' is also misleadingly named. What I can figure is that the main character Xavier is a an eXtreme sports hero, the kind you might see in the X games, and there you have it, folks: three X's.
My wife freely admits that she feels that Vin Diesel is a sexy bitch, and so it is no wonder that she might be watching this movie, and as I am no opponent of the action move genre, I too sat and watched the last ten minutes of the movie. This review is based solely on those last ten minutes.
First of all, I want to say something about Vin himself. I remember him in what must be Science Fiction's biggest sleeper since Star Wars, Pitch Black. If you haven't seen this movie, you must. I'm still kicking myself for not seeing its sequel. Nonetheless, Vin was good in that movie. And here's why. He was an absolute badass. His range of movement was scant sure, but how much do you have to move when you're a bad ass. Either you're swaggering or you're killing. And just as with Clint Eastwood in such great films as For A Fistful of Dollars, and of course, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, Vin only needs two emotional states: 1--total ambivalance given the amoral state of the world and the fragility of life, and 2--total objectivity given the amoral state of the world that will judge your actions and given that the thin line which seperates victor from victim is based not on morality but on composure. And there you have it, ambivalance and objectivity. The first is for all those scenes where people plead for you to take out the bad guy, and the second is for when you're taking out the bad guy. It works well, but as you can see it isn't much of a range. All Vin has to do is act like he's above it all and that nothing, not even his being a total badass, is going to change the unfeeling uncaring world. Vin did this well.
In XXX, however, Vin was not allowed to remain emotionless. They actually wanted him to act. They did not give him a pair of black swimmer's goggles as they did in Pitch Black. You could...you could...see his eyes. Okay, that's a mistake. Clearly the people who made this movie had no idea who Vin Diesel was, they thought he was an actor, but I digress.
Anyways, the plot of XXX is an action plot and is, therefore, fairly simple. As I said, I only saw the last ten minutes and yet I was still capable of figuring out what was going on. There's this guy, and he's pissed off or something, and so he's going to launch a bunch of rockets armed with biological badness at some cities in France--because if you're pissed, and you're a world wide supervillain, chances are you're pissed at France, because France is always coming out against supervillainy. This is fiction remember.
The only person who can stop this pissed off supervillain is, of course, Vin Diesel, aka XXX, and of course, his french girlfriend.
Before I go on, I want everyone to realize how badly the action film has fallen. Remember Die Hard. Okay, in Die Hard, there's a building populated by bad guys. It's surrounded by cops, who are good guys. The bad guys are going to kill everyone unless the good guys get in. The good guys can't get in, but...here's the rub, the bad guys can't get out. This is where the plot gets intelligent--the only place where the plot gets intelligent, and the only place where the plot should get intelligent: the bad guys' escape plan. They try to execute a fifty part escape plan with contingencys while Bruce Willis tries to stop their escape plan with diminishing resources, until the plan hinges on only one act, and when Bruce prevents this act, the movie is over. Good.
The new action movie has none of this. John Wu screwed all that up. Now the villain is doing something dastardly. The hero shows up. The villain escapes on a bike, then a helicopter, then an earth mover, back to the bike, over to a hang glider, and into a giant fan. Yeah! No thought. No intelligent part at all. What's worse is that what has taken place of the intelligent part is now some plot feature which seems complicated enough to thwart anyone's attempt to scry its inner workings, but unfortunately, it only seemed that way to the morons who made the movie, so that the average person does not see the intelligent part's replacement as complicated but as ridiculously stupid.
Example time. Vin is on this ship, called The Ahab, and it's headed down the river for Paris armed with a bunch of germs. Vin has got to stop the rockets from firing. Will he A. Pull out the wires to the guidance system, B. pull out the guidance system itself, C. disarm the rocket, or D. reprogram the rocket system to drop the rockets directly on his agent's house. If you answered E.-- crash the boat in the river thereby submerging the explosion and releasing the biological warfare agent into the river and poluting Europe's water supply with a deadly new strain of the bubonic plague--then you are correct. I'm not making this up folks, he blows the rockets up, and releases all those filthy little germs, into the river. What's worse is that no one even thinks about it in the movie. They're all, "good job X." What's worse is that no one on the set at the shooting of this movie commented about the stupidity of this ending.
What can I say more about this. Am I to believe that Hollywood does not understand the basic notion that polluting water is bad? No, I don't think that's it. We are watching movies after an age when people tried to make classics. Movies like Aliens, Die Hard, Pale Rider, The Terminator. Not big budget. Not high brow. Just good clean action, sometimes clever, but always gritty, and rarely ludicrous. But as I said, we are watching movies after that time. The makers of XXX, sadly, just didn't care.
In an era that has brought us such fine titles as 'Snatch' and 'Blow,' 'XXX' is also misleadingly named. What I can figure is that the main character Xavier is a an eXtreme sports hero, the kind you might see in the X games, and there you have it, folks: three X's.
My wife freely admits that she feels that Vin Diesel is a sexy bitch, and so it is no wonder that she might be watching this movie, and as I am no opponent of the action move genre, I too sat and watched the last ten minutes of the movie. This review is based solely on those last ten minutes.
First of all, I want to say something about Vin himself. I remember him in what must be Science Fiction's biggest sleeper since Star Wars, Pitch Black. If you haven't seen this movie, you must. I'm still kicking myself for not seeing its sequel. Nonetheless, Vin was good in that movie. And here's why. He was an absolute badass. His range of movement was scant sure, but how much do you have to move when you're a bad ass. Either you're swaggering or you're killing. And just as with Clint Eastwood in such great films as For A Fistful of Dollars, and of course, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, Vin only needs two emotional states: 1--total ambivalance given the amoral state of the world and the fragility of life, and 2--total objectivity given the amoral state of the world that will judge your actions and given that the thin line which seperates victor from victim is based not on morality but on composure. And there you have it, ambivalance and objectivity. The first is for all those scenes where people plead for you to take out the bad guy, and the second is for when you're taking out the bad guy. It works well, but as you can see it isn't much of a range. All Vin has to do is act like he's above it all and that nothing, not even his being a total badass, is going to change the unfeeling uncaring world. Vin did this well.
In XXX, however, Vin was not allowed to remain emotionless. They actually wanted him to act. They did not give him a pair of black swimmer's goggles as they did in Pitch Black. You could...you could...see his eyes. Okay, that's a mistake. Clearly the people who made this movie had no idea who Vin Diesel was, they thought he was an actor, but I digress.
Anyways, the plot of XXX is an action plot and is, therefore, fairly simple. As I said, I only saw the last ten minutes and yet I was still capable of figuring out what was going on. There's this guy, and he's pissed off or something, and so he's going to launch a bunch of rockets armed with biological badness at some cities in France--because if you're pissed, and you're a world wide supervillain, chances are you're pissed at France, because France is always coming out against supervillainy. This is fiction remember.
The only person who can stop this pissed off supervillain is, of course, Vin Diesel, aka XXX, and of course, his french girlfriend.
Before I go on, I want everyone to realize how badly the action film has fallen. Remember Die Hard. Okay, in Die Hard, there's a building populated by bad guys. It's surrounded by cops, who are good guys. The bad guys are going to kill everyone unless the good guys get in. The good guys can't get in, but...here's the rub, the bad guys can't get out. This is where the plot gets intelligent--the only place where the plot gets intelligent, and the only place where the plot should get intelligent: the bad guys' escape plan. They try to execute a fifty part escape plan with contingencys while Bruce Willis tries to stop their escape plan with diminishing resources, until the plan hinges on only one act, and when Bruce prevents this act, the movie is over. Good.
The new action movie has none of this. John Wu screwed all that up. Now the villain is doing something dastardly. The hero shows up. The villain escapes on a bike, then a helicopter, then an earth mover, back to the bike, over to a hang glider, and into a giant fan. Yeah! No thought. No intelligent part at all. What's worse is that what has taken place of the intelligent part is now some plot feature which seems complicated enough to thwart anyone's attempt to scry its inner workings, but unfortunately, it only seemed that way to the morons who made the movie, so that the average person does not see the intelligent part's replacement as complicated but as ridiculously stupid.
Example time. Vin is on this ship, called The Ahab, and it's headed down the river for Paris armed with a bunch of germs. Vin has got to stop the rockets from firing. Will he A. Pull out the wires to the guidance system, B. pull out the guidance system itself, C. disarm the rocket, or D. reprogram the rocket system to drop the rockets directly on his agent's house. If you answered E.-- crash the boat in the river thereby submerging the explosion and releasing the biological warfare agent into the river and poluting Europe's water supply with a deadly new strain of the bubonic plague--then you are correct. I'm not making this up folks, he blows the rockets up, and releases all those filthy little germs, into the river. What's worse is that no one even thinks about it in the movie. They're all, "good job X." What's worse is that no one on the set at the shooting of this movie commented about the stupidity of this ending.
What can I say more about this. Am I to believe that Hollywood does not understand the basic notion that polluting water is bad? No, I don't think that's it. We are watching movies after an age when people tried to make classics. Movies like Aliens, Die Hard, Pale Rider, The Terminator. Not big budget. Not high brow. Just good clean action, sometimes clever, but always gritty, and rarely ludicrous. But as I said, we are watching movies after that time. The makers of XXX, sadly, just didn't care.
posted by Monstro D. Whale at
9:42 AM
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