Category: Directed by Rob Cohen

xXx (2002, Rob Cohen)

Maybe if there were anything good about xXx–there are a handful of things not bad about it–but if there were anything good, the sky’s the limited compared to the mess director Cohen finishes with. As is, xXx is an overlong, boring, James Bond-knockoff. It starts with a James Bond stand-in getting killed in the first scene during a Rammstein concert; it’s so extreme, a guy in a tux being too lame for a metal concert. But it turns out director Cohen has never wanted anything more than to direct a crappy James Bond movie, one with a rocket boat in it.

So eventually it’s Vin Diesel vs. rocket boat, which isn’t a particularly good sequence. Cohen and editors Chris Lebenzon, Joel Negron, and Paul Rubell have no feel for the subject matter. With Randel Edelman’s drawn-out score, they’re really trying to cut together this seventies James Bond movie. Only Rich Wilkes’s hideously crappy script is all about this punk rock extreme sports bro getting forced into foreign service by Samuel L. Jackson. Jackson’s bad. He’s got a scar, which only exists for Diesel to mock, and it still doesn’t get Jackson any sympathy. He’s just bad.

As for Diesel, he’s not good, but he’s trying. He’s clearly passionate about doing this extreme James Bond knock-off where he makes bad one-liners and objectifies women. If xXx were a spoof, it might work, but Cohen’s an earnest director. He really thinks giving Diesel a dorking, also objectifying Q-like sidekick in Michael Roof is good. Cohen really thinks his actors are giving good performances under his expert guidance. They’re not and his direction of the actors is abysmal–Asia Argento is clearly more capable than the material Cohen (and Wilkes and Diesel) give her.

Oh, maybe if Marton Csokas weren’t painfully weak as the villain, it’d be a little better too.

Still, the stunt work is impressive and until the lousy CGI takes over, there’s a really impressive avalanche sequence. If xXx had another brain cell–just another one–there’d have been great opportunity to juxtapose Diesel’s workman solution to an eye-roll inducing sequence in a Bond picture. Except Cohen maybe is just doing a resume for a Bond movie? It’d at least be an excuse. Otherwise it’s just gross negligence.

But, like I said, Argento seems like she could’ve done better and Diesel gets some sympathy for being in this tragically unhip hip, “extreme” movie.

0/4ⓏⒺⓇⓄ

CREDITS

Directed by Rob Cohen; written by Rich Wilkes; director of photography, Dean Semler; edited by Chris Lebenzo, Joel Negron, and Paul Rubell; music by Randy Edelman; production designer, Gavin Bocquet; produced by Neal H. Moritz; released by Columbia Pictures.

Starring Vin Diesel (Xander Cage), Asia Argento (Yelena), Marton Csokas (Yorgi), Samuel L. Jackson (Gibbons), Michael Roof (Shavers), Richy Müller (Milan Sova), Werner Daehn (Kirill), Petr Jákl (Kolya), Danny Trejo (El Jefe), and Eve (J.J.).

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The Fast and the Furious (2001, Rob Cohen)

An undercover cop (Paul Walker) finds himself drawn into a criminal underworld with a charismatic leader (Vin Diesel)! There’s not much original about The Fast and the Furious. What the screenwriters don’t lift out of Point Break, there’s director Cohen grabbing car chase related moments out of Lethal Weapon 3 and so on. Well, Cohen also does have a neat Duel reference too.

Oh, right. I should try to discuss The Fast and the Furious, not just list all the other movies it rips off.

Diesel’s fine. Walker’s bad. Michelle Rodriguez’s bad. No one else leaves an impression. Except Ted Levine, who should know better.

The movie has this strange disconnect between Cohen’s more traditional cops and robbers bro-mance and the pervasive, overbearing soundtrack. Whole sequences are just set to a song, seemingly chosen just because it’s loud and sounds cool. Peter Honess’s editing is deaf to the corresponding songs; even if they match the narrative, Honess can’t figure out where to cut them. The first half of the movie feels entirely different from the second, mostly because BT’s sentimental score completely replaces the Top 40 selections.

Another interesting disconnect is the one between how Cohen visualizes the race scenes and how the script talks about them. Diesel gets a long monologue about how it feels to drive and Cohen’s best idea for visualizing the experience is to make it play like a sci-fi movie. Time slows down and there’s bullet-time.

But time is just a magazine.

Daylight (1996, Rob Cohen)

Stallone is Kit Latura, disgraced EMS chief (he cared too much). Besides the name, Stallone’s just the disaster movie lead and not even any interesting one (besides the caring too much). There aren’t even any Stallone grunts in the movie and he plays it straight and as well as anyone can play the terrible script. Daylight is a terrible attempt at a disaster movie as it forgets a couple of the golden rules of the genre. First, have a recognizable cast. Jay O. Sanders might barely qualify, but whoever plays his wife (Karen Young–and she’s awful) is not. And the less said about Sage Stallone the better. The second broken rule is to make the characters likable. With the exception of Stallone and security guard Stan Shaw, there isn’t a single sympathetic character trapped in the (unnamed) tunnel. In fact, when Viggo Mortensen dies, it’s a relief, since it’d have been awful to spend the rest of the movie with him around.

Besides the plotting problems, the script’s generally awful–bad dialogue, bad characters–but Daylight‘s not abjectly bad. Rob Cohen is a boring director, but he’s not bad. The sets are all very intricate and impressive (the other visual effects, terrible CG and silly composites, are not), even if the action occurring on them is mediocre at best.

When he’s not spouting off terrible character development dialogue, Stallone’s keeping the movie going. At the beginning, when it’s amusingly ludicrous, he gets some help from Dan Hedaya. Then, in the tunnel, a little from Shaw. Eventually, he’s got to push ahead himself and, at that point, Daylight gets particularly long. Maybe it’s because the ending is straight out of The Goonies.

Randy Edelman’s score is awful, Amy Brenneman is awful, Barry Newman is hilariously awful. Trina McGee is okay in one of the smaller roles and Vanessa Bell Calloway’s fake Caribbean accent (it goes in and out of course)–at least makes her scenes funny.

It’s funny to think of disaster movies as a complicated art form, but Daylight certainly proves they’re far from easy to make successful.