There’s no hiding the fact that these days Bond seems about as lively as Queen Elizabeth. The series celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, and star Pierce Brosnan is about to turn 50. Everything about “XXX” (pronounced “triple-X”) is pitched in the opposite direction, at Hollywood’s most important audience: teenage boys. There’s a cool car, but it’s a he-man GTO, not an Aston Martin. There’s a beautiful girl, but she has tattoos from here to Bora Bora. There’s a ton of music, but in place of Monty Norman’s famous Bond theme, there’s pulsing techno from Orbital. The result is a transparently calculated diversion that owes more to ESPN’s “X Games” than to anything that ever came out of Hollywood, except 007 himself.
The man orchestrating this rowdy affair, director Rob Cohen, at 53 is older than Bond. Yet thanks to “XXX” and last year’s “The Fast and the Furious,” which also starred Diesel, Cohen has become Hollywood’s chief conduit to high-schoolers. Where many directors don’t know what a skateboard “rail slide” is, Cohen even knows what it sounds like. When Cage dashes from a restaurant to escape a sharpshooter, he jumps on a purloined serving platter, sliding the makeshift skateboard down a staircase railing. The original effect sounded bogus, so Cohen’s sound team scraped a skillet across pavement and recorded the stunningly low-tech screech. “This scene just completely identifies Vin’s character, and it has to sound exactly right,” Cohen says later, smiling as the new effect is mixed in. “Every teenager knows what a real rail slide sounds like, so you can’t cheat that at all.”
Cohen is proof you can cheat your age, though. The director grew up watching Bond movies like “Dr. No,” but for most of his career made serious, often sentimental, fare like “thirtysomething.” Then he shaved his head and pierced his ear, and his career took off. “I just embraced the kid in me who loved the movies, instead of trying to be an intellectual guy from Harvard who was going to get the respect of the critics,” says Cohen, who partied like a wild kid on his set and struck up an affair with 26-year-old “XXX” costar Asia Argento.
Originally pitched as an animated In-ternet short, “XXX” has turned into an $84 million test of franchise filmmaking, those easily repeatable movie concepts that spin off endless sequels and profits. Unlike this summer’s other blockbusters, “XXX” (opening Aug. 9) doesn’t derive from a preexisting movie, a comic book or a Saturday-morning cartoon. But it undeniably follows familiar conventions at every step, leading to this question: can you mimic a genre and still reinvent it? “This is a character who would rather have anarchy than government,” says screenwriter Rich Wilkes of Diesel’s reluctant spy. “So, yes, we are putting the genre on its ear, but we are also revalidating everything it stands for.”
While its makers rightly insist “XXX” should not be viewed as a direct extension of ESPN’s extreme-sports phenomenon, the movie and the TV show indisputably share the same counterculture attitude. In an early party scene in “XXX,” the camera glimpses extreme-sports superheroes Tony Hawk, Mat Hoffman and Rick Thorne, who mean as much to teens as Ted Williams did to their grandparents. The movie’s most brazen feats share the “X Games” DNA–a parachute leap off an airborne car, a flying-motorcycle escape from a Colombian drug hideout, a snowboarding blitz in front of an avalanche.
It is in Diesel’s heavily tattooed character, though, that the mind-set of these balls-to-the-wall athletes reveals itself most clearly. An extreme-sports enthusiast one bust from a long haul in prison, Cage is recruited by the National Security Agency to infiltrate a band of Russian revolutionaries. Cage certainly shares some of their values–these anarchists know how to party, and the women are stunning–but he comes to realize that nihilism is less of a kick when innocents die. “At first, this character doesn’t care about the state of the world, like a large part of our youth,” the 35-year-old Diesel says. “And then he is recruited to save the world. The guy who is least likely to believe in anything learns to believe in something. In the wake of this last, very patriotic year, that makes sense.”
Does it ever. With college grads flooding spy agencies with job applications, “XXX’s” timing couldn’t be better. Yet it’s remarkable the movie is ready at all. When Revolution first looked at the script last spring, “The Fast and the Furious” had yet to open. But Revolution production chief Todd Garner had seen an early cut of the street-racing drama and knew it would galvanize young moviegoers. Problem was, so did Diesel’s agents. So the price for the former bouncer zoomed from $2.5 million to $10 million. Revolution’s studio chief Joe Roth balked, but no matter how many alternatives were discussed–Ewan McGregor, perhaps?–Cohen kept coming back to his “Fast and the Furious” star. Diesel’s appeal extends beyond his action-hero arms, gravelly voice and acting ability (he’s studied since the age of 7). His real draw is a mysterious multicultural look that links him to young men and a surprising number of women of all ethnicities. (Diesel, whose real name is Marc Vincent, is vague in discussing his ancestry.)
In rushing the movie to theaters, Revolution not only got the drop on the next real Bond movie (“Die Another Day” opens Nov. 22), but was also able to ride the coattails of Sony’s spectacular summer. Sony, which releases Revolution movies, attached “XXX” trailers to both “Spider-Man” and “Men in Black II,” an unbeatable promotion. Then there is the hit soundtrack, and a slew of “XXX” cross-promotions, including one with skateboard-apparel maker Vans, a staple of any teen’s closet. The next time 007 utters his signature introduction, “Bond. James Bond,” don’t be surprised if teenagers respond, “Uhh, like, James who?”
