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The X-Files
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X-Men
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Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl
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XXX
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XXX: State of the Union
(PG-13; 90 min.) So it turns out that taking Are We There Yet? was a brilliant career move for Ice Cube—compared to that, this sequel to the 2002 Vin Diesel film looks like a huge career leap. Certainly the Cube, who takes over here as a Bond-type super agent, has never starred in a movie with a $120 million budget before. Can you imagine if they'd had that kind of money to spend on Barbershop? They could have afforded the greatest haircuts of all time. (Capsule preview by SP)

Vin Diesel, star of the first XXX, gets killed off screen in Bora Bora; it's time to locate another Agent XXX—"With attitude!," snaps scar-faced spymaster Samuel L. Jackson. Attitude means the casting of truculent butterball Ice Cube as convict Darius Stone, who is given the new code name. The Cube—slapping on the game face those punk kids slapped off him in Are We There Yet?—is soon immersed in a plan by the evil Secretary of Defense Willem Dafoe to overthrow the U.S. government. So he rounds up a group of his former fellow car thieves to stop the military. It's the softest PG-13 imaginable. Heavy into cleavage, it never goes farther than the gawk. Cube, concerned over being a role model to youth, drools more over the vintage cars that the babes (Sunny Mabrey, Nona Gaye). The finale on the president's private 160-mph bullet train (imagine that sucker flying off Amtrak's battered rails) makes the digitally animated locomotive in The Polar Express look like a trainspotting documentary. Despite the light yet robust pretitle sequence and a few actual locations in Washington, D.C., director Lee Tamahori (Die Another Day) never gets either realistic spy-movie toughness or the balletic quality of the Bonds. As for street authority, this one is as tamed as Cube himself. It's the first movie I've heard that had the word "crunk" in it, and they have to apologize for it, knowing that slang word's day is done already. (RvB)

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