Maybe I have been playing too much “Need for Speed Underground Rivals” on my PSP or my latest purchase of the From Dusk Till Dawn DVD that has got me on this kick but the action of these popcorn flicks is really hitting home with me lately and this newest installment of xXx: State of the Union falls right in line.
As Vin Diesel’s character Xander Cage from the first film met with the wrong end of a building explosion on the latest xXx Unrated DVD we are left looking for a new man to fill his empty shoes and who better than a hardcore one-time agent in Darius Stone (Ice Cube) and if anyone is going to get him to do the job it is Augustus Gibbons (Sam Jackson).
Gibbons started the xXx division of the NSA and suddenly finds his agency under fire from unknown assailants. Now on the run Gibbons breaks Stone out of jail where he has spent nine years of a 20 year sentence for crimes I won’t even go into in this review. Stone is recruited to get to the bottom of what is going on around our Nation’s capital and what he soon finds is a plot to assassinate the President and he is required to think way outside the box to execute any kind of solution.
At first glance I saw no way Cube could step into the role as an action star but for his first time in unfamiliar shoes he walks the line just fine. Cube’s virginity in this genre is also nicely offset by the presence of Sam Jackson whose appearance as Stone’s mentor seems to have also worked in kind with Cube’s acting. On top of all that, with Willem Dafoe playing on the opposite side of the law the casting couldn’t fit any better.
Acting aside, this film also employs the same wild and crazy stunts that made the first film such a spectacle as explosions become common place along with high tech gadgets and some of the sweetest vehicles you have seen on the big screen and they are all used to their highest potential. Aside from a relatively slow chase scene involving a couple of tanks this picture moves along nicely and compliments the first film very well with its hip-hop feel in comparison to the ravenous techno edge the first one took.
Overall , I will say that if you did not like the first one don’t even bother with this film, you will simply annoy the rest of the audience, with your guffaws at the unbelievable stunts, but if the unbelievable excites you and a film that relies on high-flying stunts is right up your alley then so is this film.
