If you're thinking of seeing this, stop just a minute. What could you do with the two hours of your life that this is likely to take up? You could write a short story, you could do a drawing, you could father some children or you could remove your own intestines with a rusty spoon. All of these activities would be a lot more worthwhile than seeing xXx 2: State of the union (or :The Next Level if you live in Blighty like me). I went to see this with high hopes that it would be another xXx... A mindless American James Bond Movie just without the class (sorry if i offend anyone by that, but thats is essentially what xXx was). But I was so wrong.The film opened promisingly, showing something that wasn't what it seemed, but despite this being a film about setups and double crosses that was possibly the best plot twist in the whole film. The film rapidly descends into cliché after cliché (the script seems to have been created by entering lots of clichéd lines into a computer and programming it to spit them out randomly). The plot is riddled with holes which leave you wondering what just happened and was it significant, then later on you find out that it wasn't. In terms of acting Ice Cube is brilliant....at saying every line in exactly the same way. The great Samuel L gives an average performance but he could have just telephoned his lines in and it wouldn't really have made much difference. Willem Dafoe give us a generic bad guy performance. Scott Speedman does quite a good job as the investigative NSA agent despite being dangled from a helicopter, but this role is unlikely to get him very far in terms of his career. Lets get down to the important part now. If its an action movie, it needs good and original action sequences right...not if you're working on xXx2. Basically, things go boom and guns go bang, but we're not given anything really new here and there aren't really enough credible action sequences to keep the audience hooked. The train sequence towards the end of the film looks terrible, like something out of a Playstation game. The CGI falls flat on its face making the films action sequences loose credibility. one thing that confused me was who this was aimed at. by having a Black main character and featuring lots of black characters I thought maybe it could be trying to get a larger black audience. But nearly every black character is a stereotype of black 'Gangsta' culture. There is a line where xXx says "I was born looking guilty" but this is lost when the rest of the black characters are portrayed as crooks and thugs... in positive light! what kind of thing is this movie trying to say? I just gave up trying to read into it as I realised, there is nothing to read into, it is a very shallow, badly written, badly acted, badly produced action yarn. So bad in fact that I was actually laughing most of the way through... Best comedy of the year.