Movie: xXx: State of the Union

Actors: Ice Cube, Samuel L. Jackson, Willem Dafoe, Scott Speedman, Michael Roof, Nona Gaye, Peter Strauss
Director: Lee Tamahori, Producer: Neal H. Moritz

Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors, Die Another Day) steps into a sterile juvenile cinematic minefield gleefully destroying his directorial image. Tamahori with Once Were Warriors had already irreparably tarnished his reputation and now incurs the wrath of macho-preened Vin Diesel fans.

xXx 2 is like an unspeakably horrendous episode of MTV`s Pimp My Ride, an implausible parody of a badly made 007 anti-thriller, and a brazen salt-lick for underhand-junkies. If this movie does not fall from your memory banks like Martika`s Toy Soldiers kindly consult a shrink.

If ever a film was weeping endlessly, with glowering intensity for a sequel, it wasn`t xXx. This sequel is an unashamedly hopeless brain-dead affair which sees Ice Cube dusting the mantle that Vin Diesel shone. After being informed that the Tarzanly testosterone-driven Diesel bit the dust , Augustus Gibbons (Samuel L Jackson) tackily rakes up Darius Stone (Ice Cube) to play rough-ball with Capitol Hill`s white-collar bad boys.

4 years after the Pentagon`s 9/11 debacle, it is bizarre to see Hollywood filming a gargantuan chunk of the U.S. Capitol getting blown to smithereens. Mowing down Congressmen like unwanted grass. No Osama Bin Ladin to blame now, just a crazed Secretary of Defense named Decker, played by Willem Dafoe as if exulting career penance for having starred in 'The Last Temptation of Christ.'

Ice Cube takes on Dafoe, like Britney would take on Christina. Defoe hatches a discourteous coup d`etat in the White House. Since he feels that president Peter Strauss is soft as silk and fails to baptize a right-wing military agenda. A plethora of stolid cliches masquerading as a script, xXx2 churns out every second-hand action chestnut without any modicum of restraint.

xXx 2 wheels out muscularly preachy cheap political undertones, and a plot swinging from obtusely pitiable to pathetically dim-witted. The glaring lack of logic like Ice Cube driving a sports car 360km/h on a train track with his tires torn is a case in point. This sequel discredits even the intelligence quotient of a mind-numbingly stolid spastic.

Even gifted Samuel Jackson is way below his Tarantino highs as he gears toward rigor mortis. If the filmmakers had an atom of imagination , xXx2 could have be been camp delight, but the inborn weightiness in dealing with the action-led hysterics means that the movie withers as an exercise of yawning endurance. Trying way too hard to prove a point.

Cube`s crappy one-liners and behaving like an Arnie zonked on steroids will only attract braces wearing zit-faced 15 year-old gangster-wannabe hood-rats or gadget-geek sidekicks. Anyone with street-cred is cognizant that Ice Cube`s acting range doesn`t extend far beyond spewing out heaps of hackneyed dialogue through gritted teeth, while his tough guy attitude doesn`t mask the fact that you`d find more character in an episode of The Bold and the Beautiful.

The contagion of rap stars endemically seeking glory in Tinsel Town does not cut the mustard. Pure xXxcrament !!