Xander Cage is dead, long live Darius Stone! Following up sometime shortly after the events in the XXX: Director's Cut in which Xander Cage is blown up and killed, XXX: State Of The Union throws former NWA bad-boy Ice Cube into the role of America's newest top super secret agent.

When a group of commandos overtake the XXX compound in Virginia, Augustus Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson reprising his role from the first film) decides that it's time to find someone badder and more extreme to fill Cage's shoes and find out who is after them and why. His pick is Stone, who he worked with some time in the past in some sort of special op unit (it's never explained in much detail) and who is currently doing time in the big house for punching out his commanding officer, General Deckert (Willam Dafoe), who has since been promoted to a higher up position in the White House.

Gibbons and company spring Stone from a maximum security prison and quickly get him up to speed on they 'hows and whys' of being a XXX. They brief him on as much as they know about the attack and pretty much set him loose to do his thing and he takes to it like a fish to water. As Stone starts snooping around Washington he uncovers Deckert's plot through some undercover work and soon enough he's called into action to save the country from evil.

If the first XXX was a James Bond film for those suffering from ADD, XXX: State Of The Union is a James Bond for the mentally retarded. This movie has plot holes in it the size of the Pacific Ocean and a good portion of the film simply defies logic. Loose ends are never resolved, continuity is thrown out the window, and lots of stuff blows up. Car chases, shoot outs, explosions, a bullet train, and a few hand to hand combat scenes keep the action coming fast and furious like, but unfortunately the film checks its brain at the door on the way in.

The film makes a couple of backhanded references to its predecessor such as when Ice Cube notes what he 'isn't going to do for his country' or when Samuel Jackson answers the question of what happened to the first XXX with a coy 'he's dead' but other than that it doesn't really have a whole lot to do with the earlier film.

While much of the success of the first film was in the stunt work, here much of the daredevil action if handled completely, and very obviously so, by computer graphics. At times the film feels more like a video game than a movie and sadly these scenes do suffer because of it. When Ice Cube races a Shelby Cobra down the railroad tracks after the Presidential Bullet Train, the fact that the helicopters that are backing him are not real really does hurt what could otherwise have been a fun, over the top moment. Instances like this are peppered throughout the film and it hurts the movie in a big way.

The camerawork is frenetic in that the film never stops moving though not without a few impressive moments (the rooftop chase when Stone escapes from prison is nicely done... until he jumps up to catch the helicopter). The dialogue is corny, cliché-ridden, and difficult to take seriously and the performances are completely hampered by the script. Dafoe and Jackson have been excellent in the past and even Ice Cube has had a few shining moments but sadly you wouldn't know that by any of their work in this movie.

That being said, despite its rampant stupidity, XXX: State Of The Union is an entertaining, if completely dumb, time waster. The dialogue is as ham-fisted as it gets, with Ice Cube talking trash to anyone who gets in his way just to show how 'street' he is (for further proof of this, when going over his dosier we see a picture of him from his N.W.A. days) and these moments provide plenty of unintentional (?) hilarity. The movie isn't trying to be anything it isn't. It's not marketed as an intelligent action film or even an original one - it's simply a comic book come to life. If you're able to turn of your brain for a hundred minutes or so, as many of us are, Ice Cube and Samuel L. Jackson will probably entertain you at least a little bit. The filmmakers have followed up a flashy, brainless action film with an even flashier (though unconvincing) and more brainless action film.

Video:

XXX: State Of The Union arrives on Blu-ray in a 1080p VC-1 encoded 2.40.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. Aside from some minor visible edge enhancement in a few scenes, the image is pretty solid here. Colors are nice and bold and black levels stay strong and deep. There's a lot more detail here than in the previous standard definition transfer and the image is much cleaner and sharper than it's ever looked before - you'll notice this in a lot of the facial close ups but also in the backgrounds throughout the movie. Skin tones look good and there are no issues at all with print damage. A couple of scenes look just a tad brighter than maybe they need to but this isn't a constant issue and it's more than likely a stylistic choice rather than an authoring problem.