Image courtesy of www.impawards.com
Director :
Lee Tamahori
Cast :
Ice Cube……….Darius Stone
Willem Dafoe……….George Deckert
Samuel L. Jackson……….Agent Augustus Gibbons
Xzibit……….Zeke
Peter Strauss……….Sanford
Ever since 1994’s True Lies was a monster success (with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a spy and putting the James Bond franchise completely to shame, no less), it seems that anyone wanting to make a spy movie thinks the key ingredient is a $100 million budget mixed with lots of explosions and gunfire, then shaken and stirred with archetype bad guys and some generic muscle-head and served over a two hour time period is the recipe for a quality action thriller involving espionage.
With the days of James Bond reigning supreme over the world of counterintelligence and madmen attempting to rule the world coming to an end, the void in the art of being a secret agent is one that has yet to be filled by a newcomer as both Mission Impossible and the Bourne series (with Tom Cruise and Matt Damon as Ethan Hunt and Jason Bourne respectively) have yet to earn the sort of hall-marked status that the twenty movies that comprise the Bond collection have attained in the cinematic landscape.
2002’s xXx offered up a new sort of secret agent in Vin Diesel as Xander Cage, a new sort of James Bond who left the tuxedo at home in exchange for a tank-top and an X-Games attitude. With Samuel L Jackson as his version of ‘M’ in Agent Gibbons, Cage was recruited into the NSA to save the day from an Eastern European madman hell-bent on the usual sort of mayhem that accompanies a spy movie.
With Diesel not returning in yet another sequel to a movie he starred in, Ice Cube steps into Diesel’s shoes much like Tyrese Gibson did in 2003’s 2 Fast 2 Furious. Opposite a returning Jackson, Cube stars in xXx: State of the Union as Darius Stone, Agent Gibbons’ latest recruit. This time around the terror is within the borders of the U.S as Secretary of Defense (and former four-star general) George Deckert (Willem Defoe) has plans on over-throwing the government in a coup de tat at the expense of President Sanford (Peter Strauss).
The problem with all of this is that the environment it strives to live in is inhospitable to its characters, most notably the title star.
Ice Cube has a lot of traits that could make a very bankable action star for years to come, but trying to be a secret agent isn’t one of them. It requires a lot more subtlety and slight of hand than he can muster. He is incredibly miscast as Stone; the role requires someone to be more of a smooth operator than anything else and its’ something Ice Cube doesn’t have in him.
He is the kind of actor that needs to be protected from actually having to carry a movie with his words instead of his actions. And in the second xXx movie he has to be a man of bold actions and bolder statements when he’s an actor whose flawless with the physical aspect and klutzy with the verbal. Cube is at his best when he’s in the middle of an action sequence; when he has to actually speak sentences longer than five words it’s a disaster. When left to take on bad guys with his fists and the occasional over-sized machine gun Ice Cube owns the screen; he has the type of presence necessary to be believable in saving the day but his acting chops are a lot to be desired.
That seems to be the theme of the movie, as the acting is not very good across the board. The weak point of the movie is when there isn’t an action sequence working itself out. Usual strong actors Dafoe and Jackson are generally good enough to overcome the material they are given but in this case they fail to rise above it. Dafoe is in indistinguishable from his lesser moments in Spider-Man as the elder Osborne; he is evil and definitely unlikable but at the same time it’s almost expected that he would emerge in the Green Goblin suit and start throwing some pumpkin-bombs at the White House.
The action of the movie is its’ strong suit, however. The plot, if you can call it that, revolves around action sequences and serves to set each one up. It becomes a distinct and recognizably pattern not even 10 minutes into the movie as you have a short dialogue sequence and inexplicably something blows up, followed by either a chase scene with Ice Cube or a gunfire sequence. It’s entertaining on a pure aesthetic level but it’s incredibly monotonous after the first hour or so of near non-stop action. The plot holes and lack of logical flow to the proceedings are exposed at a much quicker pace because of this.
Having one or two minor complications of plot in an action-filled movie is one thing, but with the amount of problems within the story that are present in just the first half hour the lack of foundation the movie is based on crumbles to the ground.
