Wars Come and Go but Soldiers Stay Eternal

xXx: State of the Union is a thrill-a-minute, action packed movie that's significantly better than the original xXx. From the moment a crack team infiltrates an NSA bunker housed deep underneath a Virginia horse farm using electronic probes and weapons that would make any science fiction movie green with envy, the race is on. Only the head of the triple X program, Augustus Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson) and a lone techie (Michael Roof) survive and escape. Knowing it had to be an inside job, Gibbons goes outside the system for help - way outside. He turns to Darius Stone (Ice Cube), sentenced to a maximum security military prison for 20 years after leading a mutiny against General George Deckhert (Willem Dafoe) who's now the secretary of defense. Gibbons was part of Deckhert's unit too and really hated the son of a bitch. Other members of the unit involved in the mutiny are turning up dead. Something's going on, something that can't be good.

After a spectacular prison escape, Gibbons sends Stone back into the NSA bunker now teeming with agents to recover an important hard drive and heads off to his own house to get other important data. Deckert's waiting for Gibbons there and has one of his henchmen - part of the old unit, of course - tie him up and torch the place. Deckert has a hidden agenda, one we don't discover until fairly late in the movie but that I'll discuss since it's shown in the trailer. He plans to kill the president during the state of the union address and take over the government himself. It's up to the fugitive Stone, a group of his old homies, and a few others to stop him.

The basic premise of this movie - that the secretary of defense plots a takeover during the state of the union address when everyone ahead of him in the succession is in one place - is an interesting one with the potential for some great action sequences inside the Capitol building where the speech is given. Policy disagreements between Deckhert and the president lay the groundwork, and the military background and loyalty of soldiers who served with Deckert for years and years provide the means. There's only one problem. They forgot to invite the secret service to the party. Yup, Deckert is given sole responsibility for protecting the president and is able to place his key men - all soldiers who served under him - at all the main guard posts. The movie would have been a lot more exciting and felt more realistic if they'd had to work within the real framework and suborn or overthrow secret service to get their way.

The military angle is nice, though, for several reasons. It provides a shared history between many of the characters, good and bad, that adds an extra depth to the movie. It also gives Stone the opportunity to use some mighty big guns and have to improvise in one against many fights in places like aircraft carriers which have lots of nifty toys to play with. I was less excited about Stone as a homeboy from the hood. The scenes focusing on that angle were a bit slow and got repetitive. It seemed like a bad excuse to get hip black urban culture into the movie even in the midst of firefights and I could have done without most of it.

While I liked Ice Cube when he wasn't getting too ghetto and both Roof and Scott Speedman (as the NSA agent in charge of figuring out what happened in the original bunker raid) were excellent, some of the other performances weren't as good. Peter Strauss was a complete non-entity as the president. While this isn't a big role, I can't see anyone with that little stage presence and charisma ever getting elected dog catcher let alone president and he wasn't believable in the role. Willem Dafoe is sinister, something he seems to manage as naturally as breathing, but he seems to be sliding by without putting much effort into the role. He wasn't as scary or as convincing here as he's been in other movies. Samuel L. Jackson also seemed to be coasting a little, sort as if he felt the role didn't require much and thus he didn't have to give it his all.

Despite being a bit far-fetched and a bit predictable at times, I liked xXx: State of the Union. The fast pace and the great action sequences, particularly the several one against many, usually agents or military, that made good use of the random stuff just laying around (like tanks). It wasn't a great movie or even a particularly good assassination attempt movie (it lacks the writing and snappy dialogue of movies like In the Line of Fire, not to mention the truly deviant and mesmerizing bad guy), it was fun and there were plenty of explosions and cool tricks to look at. If you like action movies you'll probably like it.