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'XXX: State of the Union': More shtick than street

To say "XXX: State of the Union" is stupid is giving this insipid sequel to the 2002 Vin Diesel vehicle too much credit. Like the original, it's ultra loud and often looks like a PlayStation game. But when the fast and furious bludgeoning and blow-ups wane, the screen may as well be tuned to channel zero.

Columbia Pictures 'XXX: State of the Union' D- The verdict: Triple idiotic. Director: Lee Tamahori Starring: Ice Cube, Willem Dafoe, Samuel L. Jackson, Xzibit Run time: 101 minutes Release date: April 29, 2005 Rating: R for sequences of intense action violence and some language. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime [an error occurred while processing this directive]

This time, "XXX" (say it "Triple-Ex") wants desperately to roll ghetto style, with Ice Cube (replacing Diesel's anarchist skateboarder, Xander Cage) in the title role as Darius Stone, a tough con who was a Navy SEAL before something bad happened. But Cube — nowadays a successful producer of light urban comedies such as "Barbershop" — is so far removed from his angry rapper days with NWA that his barbs and rhymes come off as more shtick than street. "Sounds like a porno star," Cube's Stone lamely allows when introduced to his new XXX designation. Duh.

Sporting a heinous scarface, Samuel L. Jackson reprises his role as Augustus Gibbons, the ruthless and surly but staunchly patriotic National Security Agency brass who goes about recruiting top-secret XXX agents such as Stone. How and why his shadow unit of the NSA exists is never really clear. But Gibbons springs Stone from prison and puts him to work thwarting a plot to overthrow the U.S. government.

Turns out, the bad guy is the secretary of defense, played by wild-eyed Willem Dafoe. His clumsy Third World-style coup, while hardly plausible in a world of high-tech terrorism, sets the stage for a D.C. street fight between the secretary's tank brigade and an army of Stone's boyz from the hood driving tricked-out Hummers. And, yeah buddy, that's rapper Xzibit of MTV's "Pimp My Ride" leading the pack when they blow a hole in the Capitol rotunda.

"XXX" is an ultra action movie, so it's not surprising that the dialogue and acting are little more than filler and the characters are comic book cutouts. Even when he's firing two guns at once, Jackson looks like he's sleepwalking. And Dafoe seems to have simply adopted outtakes of his enervated villain grimace from "Spider-Man." For his part, Ice Cube is saddled with playing an action hero who prefers hamburgers and French fries to sex.

In a battle between his Stone and Mickey Rourke's pill-popping "Sin City" Marv, I know who I'd put my money on.