XXX: State Of The Union

Year: 2005

Grade: F-

Country: USA

Director: Tamahori

Review

there are only a few films that are as truly awful as this one. gigli (obviously) kangaroo jack, glitter, battlefield earth, and from justin to kelly are the company this film keeps. director lee tamahori directed another massive piece of shit film in 2001’s along came a spider. unlike that film, though, this film has no redeeming qualities. that said, though the grade is the same, this film wasn’t as bad as gigli. that is because gigli made me uncomfortable more often than this film. yes, this film did make me physically and mentally uncomfortable. it was hard to sit still while i watched samuel jackson flush his career down the toilet. it was hard to see the conventions of a genre be used with such little fervor or interest. generally when a film uses genre conventions it is to buttress a weak script, but the use of those conventions generally provides a decent enough template that even the unimaginative can copy a style or plot with some success; that is, after all, the point of such conventions – they are methods/elements within a film that are proven to entertain or excite. while die hard defines and maximizes action genre conventions this film does the opposite. it uses those tried and true conventions and applies them in the worst way possible; this film is the exact opposite of die hard. at this point you might think that the film is intended to be tongue in cheek and that, maybe, i just didn’t get it. i’ll say that this is remotely possible, but rather unlikely. nothing in the acting, direction or writing indicated a willful camp style.

i’m generally able to find good things to say about a movie, but i really can’t think of anything here. the lead actress had nice juggs, i guess that’s a good thing. the special effects were amazingly opaque and ineffective. the acting was uniformly bad. the “comic relief” (a nerdy white guy, who would have guessed that?) fell flat at every turn. the action sequences were poorly directed (usually to cover the bad choreography and sfx), unimaginative and unexciting. the ending leaves us wondering if there will be a XXX part 3, and that’s about as scary a moment as i can remember in recent cinema. F-.

p.s. i did not pay to watch this film. i had free tickets to king’s ransom and snuck into this film instead. thank god.

Watched in theater