XXX

Vin Diesel, armed with the box office success of The Fast and the Furious, has muscled his way into the void left by such aging action heroes as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Sly Stallone and—dare I say it?—Mel Gibson. With this action-heavy spy thriller, he grabs the James Bond genre by its jugular and shakes it senseless. He stars as Xander Cage, an extreme-sports enthusiast with three large X’s inked onto the back of his neck who is coerced by the National Security Agency to infiltrate a Prague terrorist cell. His handler (a scar-faced Samuel L. Jackson) subjects him to two lame skills tests (a staged armed robbery at a diner, a drug raid in Colombia) and then orders our thundering anti-hero to stop a group called Anarchy 99 from unleashing a biological weapon on the world or face a three-strikes sentence for his own anarchic antics. The action is exhilarating but the dialogue is mostly hokey. Diesel needs a film cleverly written around him, not one he can just readily get his arms around.