The hollow Earth (8/31/02)
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XXX. [Rob Cohen, 2002.]
This has to remind you of one of those verbal puzzles beloved of the authors of standardized tests: Aston Martin is to GTO as James Bond is to — well — Xander Cage/Vin Diesel, aka XXX — “My friends just call me X,” he explains amiably — an underground hero of extreme sports and veteran of many daring and imaginative stunts [cf. the spectacular trailer], meticulously recorded on video and webcast to an admiring audience around the world, with calculated intent to maximize the embarrassment of the establishment — a practitioner, in other words, of what used to be called guerrilla theater, albeit without all that tedious Marxist boilerplate — who is plucked from the bosom of his posse [cameos here for many celebrities of the X-Games circuit] and run through a rather overlong preamble to the principal action [a ridiculous subplot which ends up looking like an episode of some reality-television show called Who Wants to be a Secret Agent?] by Boss Spook Samuel L. Jackson [succeeding in a natural progression James Earl Jones and Morgan Freeman, and, mark my words, Fishburne will be next] — himself, as his all-too-gaudy scars attest, the survivor of extreme activities of a rather different kind. After wasting the first act running around Colombia blowing up drug laboratories, at any rate, Jackson explains finally that he needs a fresh face to penetrate the underworld operation of expatriate Russian malcontent Marton Csokas — a surly brooding and perpetually unshaven gangster who hangs out swilling vodka day and night in an assortment of architectural masterpieces around Prague, surrounded by formidable dudes in long black leather overcoats and trashy East-European models in ripped fishnet stockings high leather boots mutant lingerie and politically-incorrect fur coats, and, should he not like Artaud move dragging behind him a Gothic landscape pierced through by lightning, seems at least to be accompanied everywhere by an existentially thunderous electric-metal soundtrack — in short, exactly the poster boy for Bohemian attitude I’m still only a few million short of growing up to become.
Why the NSA is interested in this guy is unclear [indeed why that house of geeks is suddenly involved in black ops and messy wetware], but X arrives in Prague, positions himself in a village at the base of the mountain upon which Csokas’ castle is perched, and, representing himself as a land-surveyor, launches an interminable campaign to get Csokas’ bureaucracy to recognize his credentials and validate his existence. — No. — Sorry, wrong initial. That was K. — No, in fact Vin effortlessly insinuates himself into the party scene, ingratiates himself with the main man, and immediately starts making eyes at principal gun moll Asia Argento, whose position as Csokas’s main squeeze and as the allimportant Chick Who Stares Intently At The Laptop During Electronic Funds Transfers [no spy movie is now complete without one] may or may not preclude romantic advances.
Obviously none of this would carry farther than an extended Rammstein video, were it not abruptly revealed [by complete and ridiculous nonsequitur] that Csokas, this punk anarchist whose response to the collapse of the Old World Order has been to party like it’s 1999 and move a few hot cars for walking-around money, is also, without apparent motivation, planning to destroy the world with some hijacked chemical/biological weapons. — Camus was indeed the great poet of philosophical rebellion, but he did not mean to be taken so literally when he spoke of “an absurd reasoning”. — Moreover, and this is truly risible, our evil mastermind plans to launch his assault on humanity by strapping some missiles on a robot submarine! which, presumably, will find its way in the course of geologic time down the whatchamacallit to the Elbe to the sea without its batteries running down. Or something like that. — A glance at the map, obviously, reveals why Czechoslovakia has never been feared as a naval power, suggesting inevitably that the authors either didn’t know themselves where Prague was before they flew into town with a shooting script or [perhaps more likely] that they are letting drop some very feeble joke meant to echo one of Diesel’s leaden early speeches regarding the fact that it is a point of pride with Generation X++ that they were educated by the Sony Playstation and don’t know how to read, write, spell, perform elementary computations, or find Central Europe on the globe. — But who cares. It’s all still fun to watch.
After this mad scheme for universal conquest has been revealed, at any rate, X must storm the citadel, rescue Ms. Argento [an agent herself, of course — but you saw that coming], and, after sprinting through an X-Games Decathalon — diving out of airplanes, scaling a gigantic rock wall [apparently the Eigerwand has been moved to the outskirts of Prague], outrunning an avalanche on a snowboard, doing some fancy shit with an improvised skateboard, jumping over a few buildings on motorcycles, and laying a lot of rubber with that gorgeous purple ’67 Pontiac — save the world. — Convey my admiration to Vin and his daredevil stuntmen, and, expect me there for the sequel.
In the meantime, however, besides trying to ensure a modicum of geographical plausibility in the future adventures of our hero, somebody should do something about the dialogue, which was so dry, wooden, and lifeless as to constitute a fire hazard, leave out the unmotivated quotes from
The Third Man, try to make up a decent mad scientist and come up if not with a labyrinthine Le Carré plot at least with the one or two twists we expect even in Bond [where was the bent CIA dude? the bad girl mistaken for a good girl?], reconsider the idea that our hero speaks nothing but English, try to make sure all those individuating little character traits are consistent [if Diesel knows a Beretta at a glance, why can’t he find the safety on his machinegun? if he sidles up to the bar and orders fruit juice like a duespaying granolahead in one scene, how can he drink the Russians under the table in the next?], let Diesel rescue himself from his predicaments rather than [deus ex machina, not once but twice] have somebody bust in the door just as he’s about to get smoked, refrain from killing off the evil mastermind halfway through the chase and attempting to bring the action to a climax with a confrontation with an unconvincing robot, and, by all means, check the camera angles: in the wrong light Diesel with shaven head looks exactly like Doctor Evil.
Renaissance babe Argento, who certainly deserves international stardom, seems to have taken this opportunity to open her autobiographical film
The Scarlet Diva [which she wrote and directed and in which she starred] in New York; a canny decision, proving that in addition to having attained the status of a European auteur she has also mastered the purely American art of self-promotion. [She’s also apparently a great cook.] — And I don’t know about Vin’s tattoos, but that angel on her stomach is for real.
____________Surrender, Dorothy (8/6/02)
