New to home video: XXX: The Return of Xander Cage

Action movies traditionally stretch credibility when it comes to applying logic to their stunts. (“Wait, could somebody really survive that?” “Wait, is that even physically possible?”) And, admittedly, the stunts in the first “XXX” stretched credibility even by action movie standards. But the latest movie in the franchise — “XXX: The Return of Xander Cage” — takes even those standards and throws them out the window. The results are sometimes entertaining, sometimes just annoying.

In the first movie, Vin Diesel starred as Cage, an extreme-sports dynamo recruited as a special agent by the NSA. A salary dispute led to Diesel’s temporary replacement in the second movie (which instead starred Ice Cube as Darius Stone, the “new Agent XXX”), but now Cage/ Diesel is back, and hoo boy does this movie celebrate his return to ridiculous extremes. Every line of dialogue seems written, every action scene is choreographed, with the singular agenda of constantly reminding us how awesome Cage and Diesel allegedly are. From his introductory scene, in which Cage inexplicably shrugs off a fall that should have killed him, to the countless supporting characters who refer to him as “the legendary Xander Cage!” (a phrase I started to get a little tired of), to the scene in which Cage has to prove his bona fides to a criminal informant by bedding multiple women at the same time (though it’s very unclear exactly how this feat is supposed to prove his legitimacy as anything other than a particularly skilled lover), Cage repeatedly outbonds Bond, all with a smirk that Bond himself would find a bit too smug.

The plot: a device called “the insultingly obvious McGuffin” —oops, I mean a device called “Pandora’s Box” is stolen from the American intelligence community (the movie, in a bit of very sloppy continuity, is noticeably inconsistent over whether the device was stolen from the CIA, FBI, or NSA), and the humorless deputy director (of whichever agency it’s supposed to be) recruits Cage to find and return it. Cage, in turn, recruits a small group of risk-takers to aid in his quest, and together, Cage and his friends chase, are chased by, and fight countless bad guys in the course of his mission.

Let me take a moment to describe one particular scene, just to illustrate how thoroughly the filmmakers disregard any possible intelligence from their audience: There is a motorcycle chase scene. It starts out in the middle of the night, and is inexplicably in broad daylight moments later.(Did the filmmakers somehow actually forget the beginning of the scene, or are they trying to imply that the characters have been engaging in a high-speed chase for hours?) A good portion of this motorcycle chase occurs in the ocean, as the bikes can instantly convert into jet skis. Conveniently, both the hero and the villain know exactly what button to push on their stolen motorcycles to activate this transformation. At some point, a small gang of henchmen show up at the beach and start shooting at Cage during this chase. It’s worth noting that Cage and the bad guy have, at this point, been chasing each other all over the island. Did the gunmen somehow psychically know that the chase would end up at this particular beach, or did they just choose to wait at this random spot “just in case,” and proved to have made a lucky guess? Tellingly, this isn’t the last time characters suddenly pop up for no discernible reason other than to heighten suspense or to push the plot along where it needs to go. How does everyone know where everyone else is in this movie, anyway? Are they watching the movie as it plays out, like in “Spaceballs”?

By the time the movie gets to its final, yawningly predictable plot twist, you’ll have been entertained to an extent, but you’ll also be relieved it’s all finally over.