For this week’s movie, I ended up with xXx: Return of Xander Cage (2017). A movie that while watching, I found myself asking “who asked for this?” The third in a trilogy that I’m not sure was popular or well received in the first place, that was released TWELVE years after the last one. I just took a moment to open the IMDB pages for the other two movies, xXx (2002) and xXx: State of the Union (2005) and the first one had a budget of $70,000,000 and only made an estimated $44,000,000 at the box office… State of the Union (2005) had a budget of a whopping $113,000,000! That’s ONE-HUNDRED-AND-THIRTEEN-MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS! And it only made $12,000,000 at the box office! Goodness these stats are horrendous. Typically I will look at action flicks through the lens of “did they set out to serve their purpose of filling seats in the theaters?” as you’ve seen in my other reviews, i.e. Meg 2: The Trench (which had great return on investment). But holy smokes, the entire trilogy of xXx movies has not done that for a single one of the films… xXx: Return of Xander Cage had a budget of $85,000,000 and made a measly $20,000,000 at the box office. These stats are only helping to back up my opinion of this movie. I may have seen the first two when I was younger, but xXx (2002) was released when I was 11, and the sequel, xXx: State of the Union (2005) was released when I was 14, so I have little to no memory of either of them. And after watching xXx: Return of Xander Cage, I have no desire to go back to the beginning for this trilogy. 

xXx: Return of Xander Cage starts off as your typical action movie, there’s a device that can knock satellites out of orbit and use them like drop bombs to take out entire buildings. Because, you know, that’s how satellites work… They’re not designed to burn up upon re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere for safety reasons or anything, they’re literal sky bombs waiting to fall back to earth and destroy entire city blocks. As soon as this premise was introduced, I groaned out loud. And then the action sequences started and this movie got even worse. The first major action sequence is Xander Cage (Vin Diesel) jumping off a power line tower with skis on, falling to the ground, not shattering a single bone despite jumping from a height of 50-80 feet, and then skiing downhill through a forest. He even grinds a tree, and jumps off a cliff, lands on a roof, and then grabs a skateboard from the local children. Then an all too long action sequence continues with him speed skating down a roadway, grabbing vehicles, taking sharp turns etc. For some reason, everyone around him watching is smiling and cheering him on. It felt very “and then everyone clapped.” Then he’s racing against a timer that looks like a bomb counting down, but it turns out he was just snagging a battery pack to turn on a couple TVs so the locals could watch the football game. 

The other glaring issue with this movie is the fact that Ruby Rose is in it as a main role. She plays the badass woman sniper, Adele Wolff. Her acting was very poor, her character was cringe as all get out, her hair was laughably awful. I cannot stand her or practically anything she’s in. I also found a few articles from around 2019 that said otherwise, but there are numerous scenes in xXx: Return of Xander Cage that she is in that she looks like a CGI version of herself, or that they possibly filmed her at a different framerate than the rest of the scene that she’s in? It was rather jarring and confusing. None of the other characters appeared this way in any of the scenes. 

See what I mean here? That thing is not human, I just believe in my gut that it’s not. 

The funniest scene that Ruby Rose in is funny because of how ridiculous it is, not because of her acting or performance whatsoever. They go to the Philippines to find the magic satellite control box, which they have named Pandora’s Box. Upon infiltrating the bad guy’s weird outside nightclub space, they set up with the team around the premises etc. She wraps a long cloth around her back, hands, and a tree and epically climbs the tree. The next time we see her, she is all tied up and laying out from the tree on her belly with her feet on the tree. We see her looking down her sniper scope over the outdoor nightclub, cracking bad and groan-inducing jokes with Xander Cage, and I’m sitting here wondering why in the hell she is all tied up in this formation, and how she even managed to do this to herself, by herself. Once the action starts, she unties herself, and begins unraveling and twirling towards the ground. This entire sequence takes SO LONG. They show her unraveling, it cuts to more action at the nightclub that’s happening, then it cuts back to her STILL UNRAVELING, then it cuts back to the nightclub action, then finally back to her STILL TIED UP AND DANGLING FROM THE TREE. She doesn’t even become completely untied, she’s still rigged up, hanging a few feet off the ground once all is said and done. Utterly deranged. I want to know who specifically thought that this would be badass in the writers room, who greenlit this “acton sequence”, all so I can hopefully never willingly watch anything they’re involved with again. 

There is so much more that happens in this movie that has a run time of almost two hours, too much to rant and complain about. The acting is awful, the story is nonsensical and bad, the shoehorned “love story” with Serena (Deepika Padukone) and Xander Cage is disgusting. The director of the mission, Jane Marke (Toni Collette) delivers the most emotionless dialogue I’ve seen in a long time, and then it turns out that she’s the real bad guy all along, and even in her final moments, her lack of emotion in her acting is aggravating. This movie is in no way a fun, or entertaining watch. It genuinely made me upset at every turn of events. Again I ask, “who wanted this? Why was this made?”

I cannot not recommend this movie, nor any of the trilogy enough. Please do yourself a favor and watch literally anything else; even just paint drying, or sitting quietly in a dark room would be a better use of your time. 

-0.5 mallards/5

-Seann

Game Over, Man! (2018) is a Netflix original movie featuring the main three cast of actors as the sitcom Workaholics, which was actually somewhat popular back in the day (here meaning around 2013). I’ll admit that I did watch the first season of Workaholics when it came out and I did find it pretty amusing, potentially even laugh out loud funny. That being said, at the time it came out I was 19 years old – the exact demographic to which it was made to appeal. As my sense of humor has changed and become more mature (I hope) in the decade and a half since then, it’s clear that the same is not true for Holm, DeVine, and Anderson.

Game Over, Man! (2018) has the distinct disadvantage of being a Netflix film, which means that unfortunately it’s more or less designed to be on in the background while the ‘viewer’ does other tasks. A theatrical release, in which the audience will be paying for a ticket to sit in a theater and (hopefully) give the screen their full attention has a significantly different set of benchmarks, conventions, and devices that it can use to keep the audience engaged. Netflix releases, which do not, by design, require full attention from viewers, are not beholden to these same standards. This isn’t necessarily a good or bad thing, and I think it’s important for there to be media that is accessible to people regardless of the medium or mode in which they watch it. There should absolutely be things for people to watch while they do the dishes, fold laundry, exercise, etc. For a good example of this, check out my recent review of the Toy Story short film.

There are some advantages to not having a theatrical release. The biggest one being, of course, that the film doesn’t have to go through the Motion Picture Association of America (or MPAA). For those who don’t know, this is the agency that gives a film its rating: G, PG, PG-13, R, or X. The Workaholics boys take full advantage of this fact, and use graphic gross-out humor often throughout the movie. There’s extreme bloody violence, including dismemberment (emphasis on the ‘member’ part of this word….if you catch my drift), graphic sexual content, course and insulting language (including the use of slurs as punchlines), violence against animals, and extreme nudity. These aspects are entirely used in an attempt to get laughs, as opposed to in an artistic or tasteful way, and it almost universally falls short.

I can’t be more clear than this – this movie’s run-time is 101 minutes, and the creators’ goal was for the audience to be laughing for the entirety of those 101 minutes. This movie does NOT let up on the ‘comedy’. It’s unrelenting in its attempts to make the viewer laugh. This is often a recipe for a horrible film. Think about some of the great comedies of all time. Maybe you’re thinking of Ghostbusters (1984) or Caddyshack (1980) or Airplane (1980) or, for a more recent example, Superbad (2007). The humor in these films is derived from the subtlety – they don’t smack you over the head repeatedly with a plaster sign that says “laugh”. At the time of my writing, my lowest rated film on the blog is Unfrosted (2024), which I railed against for having a similar tenacity and ruthlessness of unfunny jokes.

To go a step further, and perhaps diagnose a problem with contemporary comedy films, this movie relies heavily on the ‘cameo’ aspect for its humor. Here’s a short list of cameos from celebrities whose names you may recognize: Action Bronson, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Mark Cuban, Donald Faison, Flying Lotus, Joel McHale, Fred Armisen, and Sugar Lyn Beard. Do these cameos contribute in any meaningful way to the plot of the movie? Absolutely not, and in fact, they often detract from the overall sense of action and thrill. They all play themselves, and are on screen for scarcely one or two scenes. It makes one ask the simple question of ‘why?’ What is the advantage of having these people do this? I think the goal is to conflate recognition (when the viewer goes ‘oh, hey, I know that guy!’) with humor. Is it funny when someone gets shot in the head by a terrorist mastermind? No, not particularly. Okay, but what if that guy was THE GUY FROM SCRUBS?!? Hilarious!!!

There was one cameo I did enjoy, and sadly, was probably the only highlight of the movie for me. The Jamaican singer/rapper Shaggy makes an appearance and actually has some speaking lines and performs a small section of “It Wasn’t Me”. I think the comedic timing of this cameo was actually pretty well-done, as well as Shaggy’s acting being just passable enough to not completely lose what little immersion there was, while not seeming like he was trying too hard. I’m a fan of his in general, and it was nice to see him try to resuscitate this movie. Similarly, the role played by Sam Richardson (of I Think You Should Leave fame) was a breath of fresh air. Perhaps I’m a bit biased because I like that show (….doing exactly what I said was bad to do in a previous paragraph), but I felt his character was one of the more charismatic ones.

Overall, this was not a movie that really had any artistry, or even an attempt at artistry. There is one scene in which the cinematographer tries to play around with some camera angles, but it was so jarring because the rest of the movie was shot so straightforwardly, that it felt really out of place and heavy-handed. The acting is rather poor for the most part, the plot is not only silly but unrealistic and low-stakes, the characters are flat and lifeless, the whole thing takes an even bigger downturn in act three, and it was just not a good time.

Game Over, Man! (2018) has an IMDB score of 5.5/10 (somehow…), a Rotten Tomatoes tomatometer score of 19%, and a Letterboxd rating of 2.5 out of 5. These are all too high.

-1 mallard/5

-Maxwell

PS – there is an interesting and coincidental moment in this movie in which one of the characters references “XXX”. One of the others says ‘that’s a movie with Vin Diesel”. You might note that the movie Seann is watching this week IS that Vin Diesel movie. What a funny bit of lore.