Once in a great while you see something that sinks deep into your brain, its claws dragging your thoughts to it again and again. You lay awake in your bed through the darkest reaches of night wishing for sleep if only to give your mind a reprieve. I recently encountered a piece of media so wild, so confounding, that I have been compelled to write this to prove to myself I am not insane.
I watched xXx: Return of Xander Cage.
I will summarize a little of the movie not just for you but for me. To see them written down may help convince me that they were real things that happened, and help me accept and move past them. Fifteen years after the first xXx movie, Vin Diesel returns as Xander Cage and the CIA wants him to recover a piece of software that can crash a satellite into the Earth. Vin Diesel does this very easily and anticlimactically murders the head of the CIA, who is holed up in downtown Detroit. Vin takes the software mcguffin and returns it to the government, specifically an agent played by Toni Collette. It is at this point you expect a twist of some kind — there is simply too much movie left for them to just end it like this. A traditional action movie would have a reveal that maybe the government agent directing this wasn’t actually part of the government, or maybe they had their own scheme all along, or maybe there would be a betrayal of some kind from one of the other characters in the movie. No. At this point something so wholly unexpected happens I was almost physically knocked back in my seat. Toni Collette receives a phone call while talking to Vin Diesel. Afterwards she calmly tells him that that was the President and that the President will use this technology to ensure American supremacy. Oh and also he has ordered her to kill his team and then drop a satellite on them to cover it all up. Then she shoots him. After this things begin to get unhinged in a way that I cannot describe without being accused of hyperbole. Despite being in downtown Detroit and despite being in the process of dropping a satellite on them, dozens of US soldiers begin attacking the xXx team. They come in human waves and are mowed down ceaselessly, seeming to know that their lives are already over even if they murder the people hiding in this building because a satellite is about to fall on it. Eventually there are simply no more soldiers or government agents to kill and the movie just…ends. Vin Diesel makes a joke about getting his jumping out of a plane on camera, they go to Samuel L. Jackson’s funeral and then credits.
This is the end of a movie that made over three hundred million dollars.
That this film contains so many classic action movie tropes (including my favorite - where the main character has a conversation that is supposed to be secret at full volume and in public in front of people that nobody notices but with the amazing twist that it is at the other characters fake funeral) but is able to spin them out in such a staggeringly original way in the last twenty minutes is fascinating. You expect a true villain reveal, but what do you do when the villain turns out to be the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. He not only orders the murder of a secret agent who was already presumed dead at the beginning of the movie, but wants a satellite dropped in the middle of downtown Detroit. I have to write this out clearly — The President of the United States suddenly makes an appearance in a hundred million dollar action movie and orders the deaths of thousands of civilians and soldiers and the decimation of a US city. He does this without warning and every government agent is immediately on board with this. There is no classic speech about the greater good, or a moment of mercy where Toni Collette gives Vin Diesel a chance to escape because of the bond they forged ostensibly saving the world. The President calls and tells her to murder a bunch of people in cold blood for literally no reason and she does it without thinking. Even in movies where the government is the villain turns like this are threaded with the idea that the organization is good, but the people in charge of it are corrupt or flawed in some way. Its fascinating to begin to dissect a movie where every single character and organization is both totally evil and comedically incompetent, a world with no grey at all. Where do you even begin?
The only character that garners any sympathy is the villainous head of the CIA. He has maybe two minutes total of screen time, and for most of that is sweaty and hysterical. He has glimpsed something true about the world he lives in and it has moved him beyond sanity but can offer no other solution than to burn everything down. What do you do in that situation? Samuel L. Jackson’s character returns from death to rebuild the triple x program but for what? For who? What good are extreme sports skills when faced with the nightmarish idea that your government is ruled by a lunatic who cares nothing for human life? What does anything accomplish when you are faced with the reality that no matter what there are going to be satellites raining death from the sky on anyone at any time no matter what you do and that no actions good or bad can prevent the system from wanting that to happen?
Everything about this movie feels untethered to reality and yet also so accidentally rooted in it that even thinking about it gives me a headache. I know that in some time I will forget it, I hope. It may never be the subject of serious study or academic writing. But I have watched this movie and after watching it my pain is constant and sharp and I hope for a better world for everyone.
I might watch it again.
