Not as good as porn
There’s really no way to win when reviewing XXX: State of the Union. It’s stunning that as stupid as it gets, there’s a crew of knuckle-dragging Neanderthals with 13-year-olds’ mentalities ready to flock to this type of movie before downloading it off Direct Connect, buying the DVD the day it’s released and then waiting another three months to be suckered into buying a special edition rerelease with more boobies and explosions. It would keep me awake at night if I wasn’t already having fever nightmares of the first XXX.
Darius Stone (Ice Cube, Friday, Barbershop) is an ex-Army operative sent to prison for disobeying orders in the heat of battle. As played by the pudgy Cube (once known as Doughboy in Boyz n the Hood), Stone is a stretch as an action hero, particularly with his affection for shakes and french fries. Audiences are supposed to believe Stone could beat up teams of soldiers with his bare hands, dodge bullets fired at point-blank range and, during a prison escape, jump off a building onto a helicopter. If Andy Dufresne thought of that, The Shawshank Redemption would have been 10 minutes long.
Stone is recruited to deal with trouble in Washington. Secretary of Defense George Deckert (Spider-Man’s Willem Dafoe) is plotting a massive coup of the White House, leaving the administration in a pool of blood and only Deckert to assume the presidency. What he plans to do once he assumes office is unclear, although it has something to do with stomping out compassion and democracy, or something.
Samuel L. Jackson returns as Augustus Gibbons, the facially-scarred head of the National Security Agency who gets to bark orders and shoot guns, which seem to be the only things he’s done on screen in the last five years. Also on board as co-hero is the realistically- named Kyle Steele (Scott Speedman, Underworld), an NSA suit with a penchant for skydiving, boxing and being cardboard, while rapper Xzibit provides a hand as a car thief who predictably comes through at the 11th hour when Stone is in need of some exxxtreme help.
If State of the Union earns any points, it’s as a farcical gag. When one character is stopped by cops, Stone rides an inflatable boat off a ramp and onto a bridge, landing on police cars that burst into fireballs. A pro-voting message that spurs our heroes to action is humorously contrasted by scenes of Xzibit and crew “saving” the president by shooting loads of artillery at the White House, leaving it in rubbles. At one point, Stone pilots a tank and swerves out of the way of the villains’ rockets. Whenever Deckert explains his devious plan to others, they flash him a look as if to say, “Yeah … I don’t think that makes much sense.”
Perhaps it’s just meant to be a lark. Maybe there’s fun to be had here, between the loud rock music, ridiculous explosions, improbable stunts and presence of the always-sneering Ice Cube. Still, there’s a base mindset in this type of crap that seems dangerously threatening. When an evil, white female character is harshly punched in the face twice, the audience I was with dissolved into scattered applause both times, and when Stone suggests a church congregation appeal to blacks by serving free fried chicken, hooting and hollering occurred. State of the Union might not necessarily be dangerous cinema, but at the moment, it at least qualifies as crushingly stupid.
