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"xXx: The Return of Xander Cage" is high-octane, low-brow escapist fun

1/20/2017

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January 20, 2017: Today’s the day. Just take a deep breath. Is this real? It... it can’t be, right? How could this happen — something so absurd, so improbable it almost seems we’re living in a parody of reality? A new xXx movie? Stranger things have happened, I suppose.

​You know how it goes: You can’t always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need. And really, xXx: The Return of Xander Cage is arriving just as we absolutely need it. (Note: Please mind the preferred style little “x," big “X," little “x," which is used to in this instance to indicate extra extremeness.)

I’ll even go so far as to say I suspect the makers of xXx: TROXC may have somehow known what the outcome of the presidential election was going to be back when it was still in production, and they knew that we as a nation would need some sweet release from this day — and a reminder of one thing that really makes America great: blissfully brainless big-budget blockbusters.
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xXx: The Return of Xander Cage is that. It’s a big, stupid movie that understands the golden rule of action movies in a post-Fast Five world: if you’re going to be a big, stupid movie you better damn well try and be the biggest, stupidest movie you can be. And while it fails to deliver the fun factor of that series, it’s still an entertaining dose of high-octane, purposefully low-brow escapism that makes the Fast and Furious films seem firmly grounded in reality.

xXx: The Return of Xander Cage doubles down on absurdity; it sees your "ramping a car off a bridge" and raises you "Vin Diesel skiing through the jungle.” And fighting absurdity with absurdity is exactly what I needed on a day like today. I went into the theater in a bad mood and left forgetting my worries, if for just a short while. xXx is a Red Bull-chugging, nipple-tattooed mental palate cleanser on a motorcycle ramping over the woes of reality.

After being replaced in the second xXx film by Ice Cube, Vin Diesel is back as Xander Cage, hater of sleeves and sayer of the word “suit” as an insult. He’s joined by and goes up against a team that includes the delightful blind kind-of Jedi guy from Rogue One (Donnie Yen), Game of Thrones' Sandor “The Hound” Clegane (Rory McCann), Ong-Bak bad-ass Tony Jaa, and a few other familiar faces as they try to save/destroy the world.

As an escape xXx is nice, but it’s far from perfect — shocker, I know. For all the mindless fun it delivers, it still suffers from being a pretty terrible film. The spine-jolting bumps that snatch some of the fun out of this rollercoaster attraction come thanks to editing that seems to have been done by a hamster on speed. The camerawork and jarring quick cuts feel as dated as xXx’s ink. If you were longing for Bourne Identity-era jumps that force a brain-strain to connect the dots between each second of footage, you’re in for a skateboard bomb down nostalgia hill. For everyone else, xXx: TROXC can be impossible to follow at times in the thick of the action. You’ll often be struggling to process the last (potentially?) cool thing you may or may not have just seen as another one comes flying your way. It's confusing at times and also a shame, as I feel we miss out on some of the insane and dazzling displays of physicality Yen and Jaa have to offer.


We also get some oversights that seem to have been left in as a joke they’re so blatantly bad. Scenes jump from sunny to rainy and midnight to midday within seconds.

xXx has little respect for the laws of physics, best practices in editing, or women: I don’t think a single female character was introduced without a slow body pan from hips to head. Sure, the movie and its cast are meant to be eye-candy, I get that, but a leering, lingering shot of someone’s crotch still feels a little icky.

Then again, if we’re focusing on what’s wrong with xXx, we're missing the bigger, dumber picture. You could fill a notebook taking inventory of all the missteps it makes and all the reasons xXx: The Return of Xander Cage doesn’t make sense — even compared to other similarly silly movies. I mean, dirt-bikes racing on the ocean? Can you believe this crap? True, the world of xXx, like our own, doesn’t make sense, but at least it’s over in about 90 minutes. 

(Side note: You totally thought the motorcycles on the ocean bit was going to be the film’s climax, right? Turns out it’s only like half-way through the movie!)

Whatever your thoughts on the original xXx (and hopefully you haven’t spent too much time over the past 13 years pondering it), xXx: The Return of Xander Cage could be just what you’re looking for this weekend. You can walk into a dark room and forget about the dark place outside the theater doors. It might not be productive, but sometimes we all need a little reprieve from reality. The real world will still be there waiting when you're done — still as deeply flawed and heart-breaking and beautiful as it ever was.

—Eric Pulsifer
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Scorsese's “Silence” is a tense, slow-burning meditation on defiance

1/18/2017

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Compared to those who came before us, we are generally fortunate to know little in the way of pain or suffering. We modern peoples of this first world are a bafflingly blessed tribe, among whom I may as well be chief. While watching Martin Scorsese’s Silence, my 32 oz. plastic cup runneth (ranneth?) over with a fine boozy porter next to a neon-yellow bag of Sour Patch Kids. Paradise isn’t an abstract concept but a place I live in day in and day out — not in an afterlife I hope awaits. The unshakable faith I have is that everything is now and will always be all right, which should mostly be true, until it isn’t.

In the meantime, we’ve got Silence, a long-in-the-works passion project of Scorsese's that offers a glimpse at the very real pain and suffering of Christians in 17th century Japan, a nation violently pushing back against Western influence.

When the biggest attack against the faith in our time is the “War on Christmas,” it can be easy to forget how rough some Christians have had it in the past. In the Japan of
Silence we see government-led torture and elaborate executions ripped from the Romans’ playbook, with displays of inventive, dehumanizing brutality that would make Mel Gibson flinch.


Silence follows two young Portuguese priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) as they sneak into this “we’re-all-good-on-priests-over-here” Japan to locate their mentor (Liam Neeson), who is rumored to have given up the faith after being tortured. In Japan, the priests have their own faith tested as they see firsthand the suffering followers are forced to endure on behalf of the gospel their predecessors have brought to this land.

I should interject here to say I recognize a movie about faith — or worse, that second-most cringe-inducing of “C” words in some non-God-fearing circles, “Christianity” — may trigger a gag reflex in more militant atheists or anti-theists, but don’t let the idea of a Scorsese movie about God (which this isn’t really, by the way) keep you from giving Silence a chance. After all, this is a Martin Scorsese project, not a Kirk Cameron one.

The silence of God is the eponymous silence here, but Silence is focused on earthly beings rather than spiritual ones — specifically how the createes deal with the creator’s silence in the face of inhumane abuse and worse.
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Trying to make sense of the senseless is the heavy and oft-explored heart of most human existential crises, and senselessness abounds in Silence.

Silence poses an intriguing moral dilemma for its priestly protagonists: Is it a greater sin to deny God or to refuse to deny God at the expense of others? The denial here is in the form of stepping on a simple stone tablet likeness of Jesus, a simple act that the Japanese inquisitors say can even be done in insincerity.

To talk too much of the dilemma and how it builds would be to spoil the difficult places it goes, but don’t shy away from Silence for fear of it being torture porn. While it can be at times difficult to watch, it never feels gratuitous.

What it is is slow but taut and building in intensity — a quiet film, but not a boring one. Also, for a movie about silence with minimal dialogue and lingering shots of trembling hands passing crucifixes or stone tablets in the sand, Silence isn't actually all that silent. The constant cacophony of cricket chirps and insect chatter is an unsettling soundtrack throughout that fills the swampy Japan of Silence (actually filmed in Taiwan) with a sense of dread.
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​Even if we can’t fully relate and wouldn’t hesitate to step on an image of any man or deity to spare ourselves and others from pain, we can feel the struggle for people whose entire lives are built on a foundation of that faith through the shaken patchy-bearded faces of the unwavering Driver and looking-for-assurance Garfield and their followers. Though it’s simple enough to shout for the Christians here to “trample” and end their suffering, their spirit of defiance is inspirational — even if it seems pointless and at times blurs the line between faith and pride or vanity. Whatever your personal beliefs, I find it impossible not to root for people who refuse to yield to power or brute force.

Worth mentioning are Silence's final scenes, a coda that is a deviation from the heralded source material and feel unnecessary — they offer a resolution that feels tacked on and deprives the film of what could have been a more ambiguous, uncomfortable closing, for better or worse.

It probably wouldn’t have taken a vision from the almighty to predict that a film about Portuguese missionaries in old-time Japan wasn’t likely to set the box office on fire, and you may be one in those ranks who feels little desire to sit through Scorsese's heavy, plodding passion project — but, for the faithful and faithless alike, Silence shows the best and worst humans are capable of and succeeds at being a film about preachers that doesn’t feel preachy.

-Eric Pulsifer
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