I'm trying to find something good to say about "XXX: State of the Union". Words like "adequate" and "noisy" combined with clichés like "high octane" and "non-stop" leap to mind. Yet, despite seemingly any redeeming qualities at all, I feel the need to give the film one star. Though, I can't pinpoint exactly what the one star is for. It's certainly not a "no star" movie like, say, "Van Helsing" or the second "Charlie's Angels". I suppose what it has is a certain degree of competence.
The film's plot (an attempted coup by Willem DeFoe's Secretary of Defense - no, really) is absurd even by the standards of the "XXX" series - an extreme version of the James Bond franchise, with the twist that a new actor will be recruited for the lead role in each film. That's not a terrible idea. While Vin Diesel did an adequate (there's that word again) job sustaining the first film, there's really nowhere for his character to go in a sequel, since there was really never a character established to begin with.
However, Mr. Diesel's Xander Cage (killed off with a single line in the new film) seems downright three-dimensional compared to the newest XXX, played by Ice Cube in full snarl mode. Ice Cube plays Darius Stone (the writers obviously put so much thought into these names, it's a shame to drop them for the more innocuous XXX), another unjustly imprisoned ex-Navy SEAL with an attitude. Ice Cube is no Vin Diesel. He's not even a Wesley Snipes (who, by the way, would be a good choice for the next XXX). Ice Cube was good in the "Friday" movies and great in the "Barbershop" movies. But he's no action hero. His game face is limited to a continuous grimace. Physically, he's too much of a big teddy bear. And, after making "Are We There Yet?", his street cred is shot.
What's notable about the skills required to be a member of XXX, the elite branch of the NSA led by Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson on the auto-est of auto-pilots), is that you don't need to have any actual intelligence at all. There is not one moment of strategy in the film. It's all brute force, shoot-first-aim-later tactics.
The "XXX" films seem content to find scripts that allow them to link together action scenes with the minimum possible allowance of exposition. Plot threads are started and dropped, characters change loyalty as necessary, and the villains don't even seem to have a grasp on their sinister plots.
I guess part of me is happy that someone somewhere is still making this kind of mindless action movie. And I guess once or twice over the course of the film I said "that was cool". So, I guess that's enough to give it the one star. Much like the film, though, there's just something unsatisfying about that.
