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Reading the press material for the movie XXX is much more enjoyable than watching it. The promotional booklet is so over-the-top in its self aggrandizement that it's actually laughable. Now that I think about it, so
is XXX, but there the laughs are far outweighed by the soul-crushing stupidity--a stupidity that assumes its audience is even dumber than the movie. And that's really dumb.

The press guide only assumes that its reader actually buys into the Hollywood hype machine. The first words in the press book are, "Tattooed. Head shaven. Buff to the max. Attitude to spare." No, it's not describing
some pro wrestler but instead the hero of our film. His name is Xander Cage, and he "makes his questionable living by selling web videos of his outrageous, thrill seeking exploits, whether parachuting out of a stolen car as it plunges 700 feet off a bridge, or other renegade activities which invite maximum adrenaline flow or, perhaps, a very early grave." If only that last option were true.

But, you see, Xander is indestructible. How else can we explain a man who hops on a motorcycle and instead of riding off to safety actually drives in circles so that the chasing helicopter can more easily target him? How else can we account for a man who has numerous options for blowing up a small building but chooses the one that involves creating an avalanche on a mountain thousands of feet above the building but only twenty feet above his position? And if Cage is not impenetrable, why would the door that's about to crush his head actually reverse course for no apparent reason? It's not just the bad guys that come in for a beating in XXX; the laws of physics are also pummeled into an unrecognizable state.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that I've seen too many action movies this summer and become jaded, that I'm expecting way too much of a movie that purposefully echoes the James Bond tradition for a new generation, that I can't accept that mindless fun is just that--mindless. Ok, guilty as charged. But before you rush out to see XXX, ponder these plot points and see if you can ignore the vortex of despair:
 1) trying to kill a man in a crowded room, Xander Cage shoots a heat-seeking missile in the opposite direction of our villain. Why does he do that? Because the villain is smoking a cigarette, which makes him the hottest thing in the room.
 2) one of the main jokes in the film's first act involves Xander Cage repeatedly saying, "Don't be a Richard, Richard." Except that Richard prefers to be called Dick. Are you laughing yet?
 3) a chase scene involving a fancy car and a speedboat takes place in the rural countryside but magically appears in Prague when the scene calls for a crowded bridge. The movie can't be bothered to have an
establishing shot that might link the two locales.
 4) on numerous occasions, faceless villains try to follow Xander in helicopters, snowmobiles, motorcycles, or some other motorized transport when the obvious solution is just to remain where they are. And these are
the same people who have designed a bio-chemical weapon that will destroy not one but ten different cities across the globe. So are they super-intelligent or super-stupid?
 5) a rich politician has actually placed a bumper sticker on his brand-new Corvette convertible. Can you imagine what cause the politician so passionately advocates? "Skateboarding IS a crime."
 6) the top-secret NSA spy agency chooses its spies based on their lack of training because the bad guys can more easily spot a spy who's been trained.
 7) Sony computers and Playstation games are prominently featured in the story. It is merely a coincidence that the movie is produced by Columbia Pictures, a division of the Sony company.

No, I don't expect an action thriller to be believable or even make sense. But I do hope that it won't completely insult the audience's intelligence, that it will have some sort of internal consistency. The James Bond movies are silly, but they at least make sense according to their own rules--if Denise Richards is going to play a nuclear physicist, she's going to be a nuclear physicist that wears short shorts, because that's what happens in a James Bond flick. In XXX, there is absolutely no logic to anything that happens. Even the explosions are random, which creates a mind-numbing sense of boredom.

So, let's get back to the press book, the one that asserts "The role of Xander Cage is all about attitude. The whole film has an attitude." It also describes Cage as "a walking advertisement for anti-authoritarianism." It
must be the 21st century if anti-authoritarianism is actually advertising. I wonder which ad agency they use.

J. Robert Parks 8/14/2002