xXx: Return of Xander Cage

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Starting a whole 15 years after the first film, we begin with Xiang (Donnie Yen) infiltrating the CIA with his team, kicking some ass, and stealing something called "Pandora's Box"; a device that has the capability to override satellites and crash them into Earth. 

CIA agent, Jane Marke (Toni Collette) then heads out to find their old agent Xander Cage (Vin Diesel), who has been "dead" this whole time. Long story short, he gets recruited again, and sets out to retrieve the device using his own team of skilled individuals he knows personally.

Joining his mission are a sharpshooter named Adele Wolfe (Ruby Rose), A DJ that goes by "Nicks" (Kris Wu), and a getaway driver named Tennyson going by "The Torch", who delights in being a record-holder for car crashes. Also aiding them is a shy weapons expert named Becky Clearidge (Nina Dobrev).

The plot is pretty basic, and the execution pretty much what we'd expect from the 'xXx' films by this point. But we wouldn't have it any other way, would we? I mean, in my humble opinion, these films are very representative of those times you HAVE to throw reality out the window to be entertained by it. But with that said, the action is pretty spot-on. Enough explosions NOT to be Michael Bay-like, a good amount of stunts, and of course we can't leave out what was probably the coolest thing about this movie; Donnie Yen's martial art skills!

Can we just stop a second to talk about how epic this dude is? Donnie Yen is looking pretty much like he's gonna be the next Jackie Chan. He's already known quite well for his role in 'Rogue One', and this is only gonna help him out, playing alongside a box office draw like Vin Diesel. For those of you who are into his skills, refer to the 'IP Man' series of films that has been an ongoing thing since 2008. And this recommendation is coming from someone who HASN'T seen any of them yet. He's just THAT good that it's hard not to recommend a series of martial arts films that he's the lead for!

But getting back to the movie at hand, I couldn't help but just have fun with it. There seems to be a fine line between dumb action that's just dumb and dumb action that's so nuts it's just fun. This is a great example of the latter. So by all means, pay to see it on the big screen with a bag of popcorn and just turn your brain off for a couple of hours. It MAY not have been as good as the first one to me, but still enjoyable enough to say I'll watch it again at some point, post-theater.

​2/5

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