The Man from xXx

This week I've had a chance to catch up on some movie watching. Monday evening I watched the Vin Diesel classic xXx, and today I caught the movie remake of the 60s TV show The Man from U.N.C.L.E. While Diesel's movie is an action ode to XTREME sports and TMfU is a retro-chic spy thriller, the two movies do have a couple of things in common. They both take viewers to exotic locals with mysterious and beautiful femme fatales, they both center around missiles being transported by water, and they are both far too long.

xXx made news this week when Diesel announced via Instagram that he's making a sequel. The original actioner blasted through theaters 13 years ago. So I'm not sure how well ol' Vin can still portray a guy whose sport of choice usually sees participants retire at half his age, but who am I to question the gravelly voiced man-mountain? Filming starts this December. No word yet on a director, costars, or even a script. But Diesel will be waiting in the Philippines, so someone better get down there quick.

Even though Diesel recently pushed Angelina Jolie out the top spot of "most represented actor in my DVD collection," I'd never gotten around to watching xXx. And now that I've seen it, I don't know that I'd watch it again, but I'd definitely put it on to make noise in the background. xXx sets out to be the anti-Bond. In the opening scene a spy in a tux gets taken out, and not even his fancy gadgets can save him. At the end, Xander Cage (Diesel) and the love interest are driving a GTO with all the absurd spy stuff: ejection seats, rocket launchers, flame throwers, GPS... All they can do is complain at how useless it all is.

Diesel's Cage is introduced as a social activist (but not revisited), XTREME sports guy (visited and revisited), with deductive reasoning skills even Sherlock Holmes would appreciated (not revisited). So mostly, he's Dominic Toretto with a wider skill set. Not that that's a bad thing. It's probably why I watch his movies.

My favorite scene came early in the movie, when Cage and company are dropped in Columbia to see if they can survive the drug cartel. After being threatened by Danny Trejo with a bloody machete, everything starts to explode. This is one of those movies where even the ice cream trucks and ambulances appear to be carrying truckloads of C4. Xander Cage wisely takes a dirt bike and starts flying through the air. No idea what he's ramping off of (probably fireballs), but he spends more time in the air than he does on the ground.

While lampooning the Bond archetype, Cage gets to say some incredibly too cool lines. After using a heat seeking missile to shoot a sniper: "I told him that cigarette was gonna kill him one day." After snowboarding through an avalanche he started with grenades: "Nothing like fresh powder." You get the idea. "You're in the Xander zone!"

All in all, xXx is a product of the early 2000's, and just as forgettable as most of what come out of that era. Still considering what Tom Cruise has been able to do with the Mission: Impossible franchise, I'll maintain some optimism for xXx: The Return of Xander Cage.

Cool

If xXx was attempting to be the embodiment of all that was cool in 2001, Guy Ritchie's The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is trying to be the embodiment of all that was cool in the 1960's. It's one thing to indulge in the surrounding zeitgeist, it's something more difficult to capture the feeling of a past. And whether or not Ritchie achieved it, I can't say. But the world of the movie feels right and is internally consistent, and that's good enough for me.

I've never had a chance to see the TV series the movie is based on, so unlike the forgettable A-Team movie I didn't have to accept familiar characters with new faces. Not to say that I wasn't distracted. I hated Man of Steel, but really enjoy White Collar. When the trailers for TMfU started coming out, I found myself wishing that Matt Bomer were playing the American spy, instead of Brit Henry Cavill. I had a feeling that I'd spend the entire movie imaging Bomer and hating Cavill, but I was wrong. As Neil Caffrey, Bomer had a self-effacing manner that wouldn't fit Napoleon Solo at all. As Solo, Cavill conveys just the right amount of smugness that you want in an American super-spy.

Armie Hammer makes a perfect Illya Kuryakin, the unstoppable (and unstable) KGB agent, but I don't ever see him maturing into a grandfatherly David McCallum (the original Illya). I can't believe I'm saying this, but I wish there'd been more Hugh Grant. It's odd that this summer we've seen both him and Kurt Russell cast as shadowy old spymasters (Russel, of course, in Furious 7). For a time Grant's name was tossed around a potential James Bond, and he seems to be having fun playing what a semi-retired Bond would be.

TMfU is one of those movies where something mundane will be happening in the foreground (Solo eating a sandwich) while something absurd is going on in the background (a boat chase, with machine guns and explosions). It's one of my favorite sorts of gags, and every time it's used here it comes off perfectly.

Much like last year's Guardians of the Galaxy, Ritchie relies heavily on popular music from the era to set the tone. The soundtrack is a nice mix of popular songs from artists like Roberta Flack and Nina Simone, and a new score from Daniel Pemberton.

Unfortunately, TMfU simply doesn't know when to say enough. It was all good fun, but by the time act three started I was the one crying uncle (see what I did there?). The ending was so inevitable the minutes spent trying desperately to build suspense would have been better spent wrapping up. Still, for all its faults, I'll probably want to watch The Man From U.N.C.L.E. another time or two.

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