marcicat | Movie Review: xXx

There’s a pattern to my tv/movie choices, okay? Right now there’s a lot of uncertainty in my life — on the news, at my job — and so I like my movies to be predictable. No surprises. Entertaining, if possible.

Which is how, somehow, I ended up watching Vin Diesel in xXx via netflix last night. I mean, I figured I knew what I was in for, right? I’ve seen Fast & Furious.

Well, this movie is like the F&F series but with *less* plot (and less… class, or something — maybe I just like movie!street racing better than movie!extreme sports). Also, I kept getting this weird cognitive dissonance, because I have this mental impression of Vin Diesel as Dominic Toretto, and the character in xXx was similar, except into extreme sports like snowboarding, and his name was Xander like the Buffy character, which is just a really weird juxtaposition, although there was that one fic where they both ended up in prison together that I can’t seem to locate anymore…

Anyway, I was all ready to write a post basically saying: yeah, it was about what I expected, but definitely viewable. And then I was reading the movie’s wikipedia page I learned that Vin Diesel’s stunt double died during filming, trying to do the bridge/submarine scene. The footage of the start of the stunt is in the movie, which — I’m still not sure how I feel about that. The whole thing sort of shadowed my enjoyment of the movie, though.

On the other hand, maybe the best way to honor someone is to remember them with joy, like in TNG when they held a party for Geordi and Ro in that phasing one. On that note, here are a few memorable movie quotes.

“Knocked over a few 7-11s, have we?”
“Nah, I was in a cast for three months when I broke my leg. All I did was play first person shooter games.”
-agent guy, Vin Diesel

“I’ve been undercover here for two years.”
“Two years? What was your plan — to let them die of old age?”
-Yelena, Vin (yeah, the name Xander just really didn’t work for me)

“If I told you *not* to jump off the Empire State building..”
“Yeah, you’re right, I’d definitely do it.”
-Nick Fury, Vin

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.