Mrs. Hatboy and I watched this movie on Netflix the other day, on the basis of “Vin Diesel is usually fun” and “meh, why not this thing?”.

These are not, as it happens, load-bearing justifications for watching this movie.

xXx: Return of Xander Cage goes right onto my list of bad movies that weren’t good-bad, or funny-bad, but were just bad. Like Slipstream. Its effects and fight scenes and chases undoubtedly cost a fortune, but they somehow managed to be boringly overblown. I laughed at the absolute extra-ness of them once or twice, and I get that this franchise is meant to be ridiculous (like every other Vin Diesel franchise), but it just wasn’t interesting. The amusing extra-ness wasn’t frequent enough to excuse the rest.

The script was abysmal. Every scene with women in it made me cringe (although as Mrs. Hatboy pointed out, this movie passed the Bechdel Test). It was like it had been written one-handed by a furiously masturbating twelve-year-old. Poor Vin seemed to be stoned out of his mind as a coping mechanism, but that might just be how he is.

Nothing saved this movie. Oh fine, Rory “Sandor Clegane” McCann was a highlight, and the movie should probably have been about him. But then it would have just been a Scottish version of Crank, and … okay, this sentence started out intending to deride that idea but that would actually be fucking amazing so why did xXx: Return of Xander Cage get made instead?

Ugh. The Riddick movies were cool, and I hear good things about some of the Fast & Furious movies (I’ve only seen one of them), but this was just appalling. One D6 + 0 out of a possible ten D6 + 4.

– Posted from my Huawei mobile phone while on the bus.