Darius Stone

Darius Stone

XXX: State of the Union (released as XXX2: The Next Level and XXX: State of Emergency outside North America) is a 2005 American action spy film directed by Lee Tamahori and a sequel to the 2002 film XXX. It is the second installment of the XXX film series, and was produced by Revolution Studios for Columbia Pictures. Vin Diesel and Rob Cohen, the lead actor and director of the original, had signed onto a sequel before the first film had opened, but both dropped out over scripting issues, while Cohen worked on Stealth. Cohen remained as an executive producer. Ice Cube took over the lead role as the new Triple X agent and Tamahori was brought in to direct, following the huge commercial success of the James Bond film Die Another Day, which he directed. Two different scripts were prepared for the film, and the one written by Simon Kinberg was selected; the other script featured a radically different plot. Released on April 29, 2005, State of the Union was a box-office bomb and it was criticized by reviewers, mainly for the performances, an illogical story, and overuse of CGI-based visual effects for most of the action sequences. State of the Union is the last film in the XXX film series to be distributed by Columbia Pictures, as Paramount Pictures became the distributor for its future films, starting with XXX: Return of Xander Cage in 2017.

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