XXX

When I finally graduated from high school, I had achieved unpopularity of a staggering dimension. I mean, picture the least popular person at your high school, then imagine he smushed his shit in your hair every day. Okay, the shit thing only happened a few times, but I had a lot of tricks like that up my sleeve. The sad part is that, like so many confused and desperate teens, I thought crap attacks, homemade buttons that said "Kiss me, I'm Irash" -- yes, I misspelled it, and no, I'm not Irish -- and eating lunch alone in the geometry classroom would make me cool.

The harder I tried, the more desperate I looked. The summer between my junior and senior year, I though it was the clothes I was wearing, and I took stock of my fashion sense. It was time to retire my trademark look: tight cutoff jeans, striped athletic socks with a jaunty lack of elastic and midriff-baring T-shirts just like the guys in WHAM! wore. Sure they were comfortable, and God knows my belly got a lot of sun that year, but they weren't cool. I wanted to wear the bitchin' jean jackets and baggy pants like the popular kids who had sex and parents who let them smoke pot.

That summer, I saved my wages from the Wienerschnitzel and in the fall I studied the Wal-Mart circulars. As I looked at the clothes, I asked myself if the popular kids would wear those socks, shirts, that athletic supporter and back brace. I went out and blew my money, and for the first time, I felt really cool. I had the jackets, pants and Sketchers like they did. I spent hours in front of the mirror in my bedroom, admiring myself for finally figuring out how to get in with the in-crowd and have sex with girls. By the first day of school, I was pretty God damn sure I'd be humping a cheerleader by lunchtime, and not in the geometry classroom. Maybe the physics lab.

Sadly, I learned what every unpopular kid with a few bucks to spend eventually learns (except the ones who later became screenwriters): that as long as I slavishly tried to imitate the cool kids, I would be a loser. Sure I had the same clothes and I aped the attitude of the popular kids, but for some reason they didn't hang from my 6'5", 153-pound frame as naturally as they did for the others. I reeked of desperation. I also reeked of body odor, but you know, that's one of those things you don't know yourself until a loved one has the courage to mention it.

XXX is the unpopular kid with the money and desire but no fucking clue and not enough courage to try its own thing. It has the clothes, the attitudes and the hobbies of the cool kids, but they don't fit. It's forced and strained, like a three-inch turd in a two-inch ass; the grunting and sweating gives it away. The movie keeps saying "Look, I'm cool now," because it's afraid we won't notice otherwise.

Vin Diesel is XXX, an extreme sports meathead who steals the cars of state senators who oppose skateboarding and totals them as he videotapes his escapades. The movie makes clear that he is adored by the homosexual men who dedicate their lives to following him, and worshipped by the zombie-like girls at the beer-commercial-cool loft parties he throws. Rather than illustrate how cool he is, though, all it does is show us how retarded Director Rob Cohen is. His idea of what makes a cool guy is exactly the same as that of a 14-year-old shut-in with an X-Box.

Diesel lives his life one Mountain Dew commercial at a time until National Security operative Samuel L. Jackson kidnaps him and recruits him as a secret agent. Jackson has a lot of facial scars, and Diesel has a lot of fun calling him Scarface and Frankenstein. Isn't that cool? Pretty fucking clever.

Jackson sends Diesel to Prague to disrupt "Anarchy 99", a ridiculously inept, unsecure and still powerful underworld gang that has acquired biological weapons. They are planning to start World War III. Why? Because they're evil. To me, destroying the world is no where near as serious a crime as the facts that they listen to Einsterzende Neubauten, call women "bitches," have a policy of a whore swinging from the bedposts in every bedroom and wear sneers less subtle than Snidely Whiplash's. They also worship Diesel for his extreme sports web broadcasts. Big, oily, musclemen everywhere can't stop lubing up just thinking about him.

Diesel infiltrates the gang with the difficulty of water going through a sieve. He then secures his position by shooting a cop (don't worry, the cop doesn't die, yet). Without so much as a security check, Diesel is in the inner circle, privy to the top secret plans and underground lairs. He gets the info needed and Jackson orders him out.

Ah, but there's a complication. Diesel has a big old musclebound boner for Asia Argento, a skanky, pasty-faced, snarling dullard who is Anarchy 99's resident "bitch." He wastes no time telling her he's really not a bad guy. "No, wait, really, I'm cool." And she quickly reveals that she too is a secret agent. The difference is that she's been on the job for two years and hasn't figured out how to open a freakin' aspirin bottle.

See, she's a woman, and as in the fantasies of any pimply 14-year-old boys, girls are good for nothing but rescuing so that they'll fuck you. You can say they're smart if it makes you feel better, but really giving them brains means they might be smart enough to figure out what a poser you are, and to hell with that.

Diesel can't leave until he's destroyed the bad guys and saved the girl. Argento is quickly reduced to shrieking and watching Diesel do macho stuff. Of course, Diesel saves the world, and at the last possible minute, too.

Hopefully, XXX will do for extreme sports what Thank God It's Friday did for disco; capture the end of an era in melancholy Technicolor. It's a movie that highlights the shift of focus from the athlete to the greedy, rich fuckers who figured out how to exploit the sports and lonely, out-of-shape slobs with disposable income. It's no longer about peoplegetting an adrenaline rush; it's about the losers at home paying to watch and thinking that's exciting enough. It's now about merchandising beverages, pants and increasingly expensive gear. In short, extreme sports has become shorthand for "cool" to middle-aged filmmakers obsessed with wealth.

It sure as hell won't inspire kids to take up extreme sports. It'll just make them want the video games. Cohen, Diesel and Company assume that the audiences are so overwhelmed with the coolness of snowboarding that story, plot, characters and common sense are irrelevant. For a movie that's supposed to turn the spy genre on its head, it's a simplistic and dull ripoff of even the worst Bond movies. At least Bond movies wink at you, but this one is too busy admiring its own muscles to smile.

Diesel isn't any cooler than the one emotion he lugs around the entire movie. He's got dull eyes and a way of speaking the hoariest of cliches with the conviction of a bank teller. He's aping cool, but his emotions are musclebound. I never worried about his fate because the movie is so clearly programmed in his favor that it's never in doubt. The villains are ridiculous. They're evil is so mundane and uninteresting that it's impossible to hate them. Instead, I just wondered if they all met while working at Wal-Mart. As the love interest, Argento is skanky enough to alienate other women and unattractive enough to shut down the hormones in the horniest of teen males.

It's a runny, hot shit full of sturm, drung and corn Certainly not good enough for rubbing in the hair of the girl you secretly have a crush on. One Finger.