In the summer of 2001, Vin Diesel became a household name. The Fast and the Furious, which was designed as little more than a modestly budgeted action programmer, became the breakout hit of that summer, capturing the cultural zeitgeist in a way that’s hard to reverse engineer. It was a major hit with the youth market. Diesel, with his bald head, muscular physique and unforgettable voice became the decade’s first icon, with audiences fascinated by his macho vibe, ambiguous ethnicity, and signature look. Studios didn’t waste any time building a star vehicle around him, with Sony making him the lead of a new super spy franchise they hoped would give James Bond some serious competition. The film, XXX, was among the most hyped films of the decade, with many thinking it would be such a phenomenon that it would make the Bond franchise irrelevant. That didn’t quite happen, as despite being a solid – if unspectacular – success, the franchise never really happened in the way Hollywood thought. Ironically, however, it led to some fundamental changes in the James Bond franchise. We’ll dig into all that as we find out WTF Happened to XXX?
Enter Vin Diesel, aka Mark Vincent. In 1995, he wrote, directed, and starred in a short film called Multi-Facial, which was semi-autobiographical and caught the attention of a guy you might have heard of named Steven Spielberg. He followed it up with a feature film he also wrote and directed called Strays, which was a hit at the Sundance Film Festival, leading to Spielberg casting him in Saving Private Ryan. In it, he played an Italian-American soldier named Carpazo, whose compassion for a child leads to his agonizing death at the hands of a German sniper. His performance was noticed in a big way, as was his voice performance in The Iron Giant, in which he voiced the main character.
By the year 2000, Diesel was on the rise, with him landing a solid dramatic role in Boiler Room and then the lead in a low-budget sci-fi/ horror flick called Pitch Black, in which he played a memorable anti-hero named Riddick, which was championed by early internet critics, and became a sleeper hit in theatres. The studio that put the film out, Universal, cast him in a modestly budgeted car flick they were prepping as a star vehicle for Paul Walker and his The Skulls director Rob Cohen. Initially titled Racer X, the movie, a thinly veiled riff on Point Break, was re-titled The Fast and the Furious. While Walker was the lead, it was Vin Diesel’s character, Dominic Toretto, who struck a chord with the young audience and turned the movie into one of the biggest hits of 2001, and by the end of that summer, Diesel was a household name.
Within weeks of The Fast and the Furious hitting theaters, it was apparent how big of a star Diesel was becoming, so Sony paid him $10 million to star in their spy flick, XXX, which was to reunite him with his Fast & Furious director, Rob Cohen. Written by Rich Wilkes, XXX was initially designed as a vehicle for Eric Bana, who turned the film down. The film was designed as an answer to the James Bond series, whose star, Pierce Brosnan, was in the midst of a successful run, even if his most recent outing, The World is Not Enough, was deemed by some as a bit wonky, with the choice of Denise Richards as his leading lady an obvious ploy to connect to the youth market, which was largely ridiculed.
XXX would reunite Diesel with much of his The Fast and the Furious team, including Cohen and producer Neil Moritz. In it, he would play Xander Cage, an extreme athlete drafted into service by the NSA to infiltrate a Russian terrorist ground called Anarchy 99, who have obtained a deadly chemical weapon called Silent Night. Right from the first scene, you can see how the James Bond franchise is being targeted, with a tuxedoed spy (played by future Cobra Kai star Thomas Ian Griffith) being taken out because he sticks out like a sore thumb at a Rammstein concert.
Diesel’s co-stars in the film would include Samuel L. Jackson as Augustus Gibbons, a scarred NSA operative who was set to be XXX’s M were the franchise to continue. Australian actor Marton Czokas, who’s since gone on to specialize playing Russian bad guys, would play the movie’s villain, Yorgi, while Asia Argento would play Yelena, a Russian agent who’s XXX’s love interest/ partner.
Sporting a hefty $88 million budget, which was about $50 million more than what The Fast and the Furious cost, XXX was predicted to be THE major hit of 2002. No expense was spared, with the Sony hype machine going into overdrive, with them even posting an XXX billboard in Los Angeles in August of 2001 before the movie had even started shooting.
Sony spared no expense in making the movie, with ambitious stunt work that included motocross and base jumping envisioned, with the gimmick being that Cage’s specialty was extreme sports. The shoot proved to be a dramatic one, as tragedy struck when a stuntman, Harry O’Connor, was killed filming a para-sailing sequence. Years later, co-star Asia Argento would also accuse director Rob Cohen of drugging and raping her during the shoot, an allegation the director has refuted.
Given the studio’s high hopes for the film, during the summer of 2002, xXx, which is how the title was stylized, was a brand you could find everywhere. I vividly remember buying the two-disc soundtrack album and finding a rub-on xXx tattoo included. Yet, while it opened to $44 million, the movie wasn’t quite the major success Sony anticipated. It made a solid amount of money, earning $142 million domestically and a similar amount overseas. Still, it didn’t strike the cultural zeitgeist in the way The Fast and the Furious did, with many, at the time, dismissing it as bigger but not necessarily better. It didn’t launch the franchise Sony hoped for, with Diesel bailing on the sequel, xXx 2: State of the Union, which replaced him with Ice Cube as another agent and proved to be a box office bomb. In fact, for a while, the movie seemed to have cooled Diesel’s ascendence as a major star, with his big-budget Chronicles of Riddick also a flop, while many also slammed him for opting out of the Fast and Furious sequel, 2 Fast 2 Furious. Of course, Diesel would eventually return to the franchise, with it becoming the kind of stunt-driven franchise xXx was supposed to be. Diesel did try to re-start the xXx franchise with xXx: Return of Xander Cage, which was a solid – if unspectacular – hit, similar to the original, and he’s promised more Xander Cage is coming.
Yet, on an interesting sidetone, xXx did, in fact, play a part in the creative reboot that happened to the James Bond series in the mid-2000s. You see, when Die Another Day hit theaters in 2002, it was chalkful of cartoonish “XTREME” action, which was believed to be a response to the fear that xXx would make them irrelevant. As such, you have Brosnan’s 007 participating in terrible, over-the-top extreme action sequences, which wound up being despised by fans, even if the film proved to be one of the highest-grossing 007 movies of all time (ironically – its director – Lee Tamahori would direct the xXx sequel). The Bond producers, noting how far off-base they’d gotten and also noticing the impact of another super spy who proved to have a much bigger impact than Xander Cage – Jason Bourne- decided a back-to-basics approach was needed, giving us the Daniel Craig era. In a way, that perhaps would up as xXx’s greatest big-screen legacy.
