Trailer: xXx: The Return of Xander Cage

This trailer is hilarious. It audaciously dares to proclaim that "the world has changed" (recalling the Dunston Checks In trailer more than the GoldenEye trailer of that same year, which itself claimed "It's a new world...") and "the war we're fighting today needs a different kind of soldier." And then it gives us very much the same kind of soldier we saw in 2002's xXx--extreme athlete cum superspy Xander Cage (Vin Diesel). I mean, that's such a 2002 concept, right? I suppose the world of espionage cinema has in fact changed since 2002--quite substantially. But you wouldn't know it from this trailer!

2002 was a watershed year for the spy movie. It was the year of the last Pierce Brosnan James Bond movie, Die Another Day. And the year of the first Jason Bourne movie, The Bourne Identity. One was clearly a dinosaur, the last hurrah of the 90s spy movie. And the other was the quintessential post-9/11 paranoid action thriller that ushered in a whole new style of screen spying. And despite its corny attempts to differentiate itself from James Bond (a Bond surrogate found himself in over his head in the opening scene, wearing a tuxedo to a club full of grungy, tattooed Millennials), xXx was very much a remnant of that same Paleozoic era as Die Another Day. Since then, subsequent Bourne films and the reinvented 007 of Daniel Craig completely shook up the genre in the very way the original xXx so transparently, desperately wanted to. But this trailer for the latest xXx movie willfully ignores all that, willing audiences instead to accept that it's still 2002. (The only indication that this Xander Cage movie takes place in contemporary, post-Daniel Craig times is a shot of Vin Diesel coming out of the water in the same pose as Craig did in Casino Royale.) And you know? You've kind of got to respect it for that. Part of me does, indeed, yearn for a return to those 90s dinosaur spy movies. (Note to studios: dinosaur spy movie! Make it happen.)

"We need people with the skills and the attitude to take on threats we don't even know exist," says Samuel L. Jackson's NSA honcho Augustus Gibbons in this trailer, echoing exactly what he said in the first two movies. Threats like extreme athletes bent on world domination. Threats requiring a grown man in diaper-white Capri pants to skateboard, and, we're told (though I remain dubious based on the evidence provided) "look dope doing it." Basically, the sort of threats you saw in Mountain Dew commercials aired during the X Games circa '02.

But ludicrous as it all is, I can't help get kind of excited about it... precisely for that ludicrousness. As I did for the previous two xXx movies--and ended up disappointed both times. But maybe, just maybe, the same magic that transformed Diesel's Fast & Furious movies into great entertainment will rub off on his other franchise. Maybe. Because, come on! Skiing through the jungle is actually a pretty damn cool basis for a setpiece! And it's been nearly three decades since we've seen a cool ski sequence in a real Bond film.