Didn't we just have an action movie about extreme sports? Oh yeah, that was the Point Break remake and nobody seemed to care. The problem may be that extreme sports is so 2000 and audiences don't really care if you can grind or hit the halfpipe or whatever the slang is. But Vin Diesel is going to try and make it cool again with XXX: The Return of Xander Cage, the third film in the modern spy franchise and yet only the second to star Diesel.
Why's that, you ask? Because after the 2002 film kicked off the franchise Diesel left to work on other projects. His character, Xander Cage, was then killed off in the Director's Cut of the movie, and a terrible sequel titled XXX: State of the Union followed with Ice Cube in the lead. So that makes the one consistent presence Samuel L. Jackson as Cage's handler, Agent Augustus Gibbons.
The film finds Cage returning from a self-imposed exile (So he wasn't blown to smithereens at all???) to take on a new team of terrorists led by an alpha warrior played by Rogue One: A Star Wars Story's Donnie Yen. Hopefully we'll get to see a lot of the awesome Tony Jaa, who co-stars along with Ruby Rose, Deepika Padukone, Nina Dobrev, Rory McCann, and Toni Collette. The funny thing about this trailer is that Jackson is delivering the exact same speech about needing a "new" breed of agent that he delivered 14 years ago. So nothing's changed since then? What's his character been doing all this time? Apparently nothing.
Directed by DJ Caruso, XXX: The Return of Xander Cage opens January 20th 2017.
