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Movie Review: 'XXX: Return Of Xander Cage'

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- While delivering fast and furious results in his other, bigger action-thriller series, Vin Diesel launched the XXX franchise in 2002.

And XXX marked the spot-spot-spot for its target audience with enough commercial success to spawn a pair of sequels. So far.

Diesel introduced us to his antiheroic, outlandish protagonist, a slacker-and-extreme-sports-daredevil-turned-government-secret-agent named Xander Cage in a mindless collection of high-energy action sequences.

The first sequel, however, was a no-Vin game as Diesel stepped aside and Ice Cube took over the lead as one Darius Stone – yes, it was XXX Cubed but they called it XXX: State of the Union and gave us a movie that was a one-dimensional exercise in Blowin' Stuff Up.

Like its predecessor, installment number two was juvenile, high-adrenaline, miles and miles from convincing on any level, and lacking in even a semblance of narrative context.

But here we are facing a second sequel and Diesel is back in the Cage for XXX:Return of Xander Cage.

2
(2 stars out of 4)

The throwaway plot finds producer Diesel as Cage, long left for dead, found very much alive and in self-imposed exile in the Dominican Republic.

He returns to action at the request of his NSA handler, Augustus Gibbons, played for a third time by the returning Samuel L. Jackson.

The CIA, in the person of Toni Collette, engages Cage to race against one Xiang, the martial artist played by Donnie Yen, to recover a powerful weapon known as Pandora's Box, which can control military satellites.

So Cage recruits a group of thrill seekers, who find themselves – big surprise here, huh? – tools in a government conspiracy as they head for the Philippines.

Once again, we are treated to an endless parade of fights, flights, chases, and shootouts. Most movies make sense; this one just makes noise. What dialogue there is is a necessary evil, merely an excuse to take a very brief pause in the avalanche of high-decibel carnage, none of it even remotely convincing.

Director D.J. Caruso (Two for the Money, Disturbia, Eagle Eye, I Am Number Four, The Disappointments Room), working from an afterthought of a script by F. Scott Frazier, assaults our senses from the very first frame and never stops playing to the attention-deficit-embracing audience.

But viewers who do not consider themselves adrenaline junkies should steer clear.

Think of it as a feature-length music video tucked into a lowest-common-denominator video game.

Which is why we'll skydive at an altitude of 2 stars out of 4. The belly-up shoot-em-up, XXX: Return of Xander Cage, is X-hausting, X-cessive, and X-asperating.

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