The first point of media interest to have been created around About a Boy is that Hugh Grant has a new haircut. The famous floppy fringe is gone. Now his hair is spiky and sticks up. But it’s not just a matter of whether it suits him or not, whether we care how much of his forehead we can see at any given moment. This new hairdo, this calculated risk taken with Grant’s particular image, is supposed to signal that he is doing something different in his new movie role. That he has, gasp, grown up.
Or something like that. The fact that the movie is about growing up, in one way or another, makes this haircut business a marketing ploy of genius — a kind of shorthand for the movie itself. And, indeed, Grant is doing something rather different here. Instead of relying solely on his diffident charm and the nervy humour he has projected in the past, in About a Boy we have a Grant character who has to put his irresponsible, disconnected lifestyle behind him as he bonds more meaningfully with other human beings, a 10-year-old boy in particular.
Grant plays Will, a man who, embarrassingly, doesn’t work. He doesn’t have to because he’s living on the royalties of a nauseating Christmas ditty composed by his grandfather. (This is the best joke in the movie.) Will can lead a life of empty self-gratification, constantly on the prowl for sex — now he’s trying single-parent support groups, pretending to have a child of his own, in order to meet likely women. He will seduce them, bed them, dump them.
But his plan misfires when he finds himself becoming, despite himself, increasingly attached to Marcus (Nicholas Hoult), whose mom is a depressive hippie with exceptionally bad taste in clothes and hairstyles. Will and Marcus, basically, help each other grow up: Marcus gets the father-figure he needs, and Will is forced to take on some adult responsibilities.
It’s all done with exemplary skill. This is commercial filmmaking with its heart in the right place, tackling meaningful issues like parenting and interpersonal relationships with seriousness but no solemnity; it has enough humour to keep us entertained, and a stylish gloss that makes it go down relatively easily. Little in it jars, though I did have a problem with the musical climax, which just didn’t ring true for me. You feel that the movie, like a good therapy session, has taken you through the relevant emotions and left you feeling that much more mature.
Why, then, did I feel shortchanged? Was it because around the same time I saw The Safety of Objects, coming out in a week or two, which is an American multi-family drama that seemed to have all the indigestible gristle About a Boy lacked? Or was it because I also saw a piece of trivial trash called xXx?
First off, and let me pedantically get this out of the way, xXx presents a small typographical problem. That’s how the title is given in the movie and on its posters, as a kind of logogram; XXX (three capital letters) is apparently incorrect, and in any case when you put it in your review people think you’ve left something out and forgotten to go and look it up. So xXx it is, pronounced “Triple-X”.
That’s the single intellectual challenge presented by xXx. It is the only issue about which one is required to have any feelings at all. This is a steroid-maddened revision of James Bond; it is the superspy movie formula given an extreme-sports sensibility. Vin Diesel, even more preposterously named than the movie, plays Xander Cage, who is some kind of anarchist guerrilla stunt-performer until he is coerced by Augustus Gibbins (Samuel L Jackson) of the National Security Agency into going on a secret mission for Uncle Sam.
He has to trek to Prague and infiltrate a bunch of black-clad machine-gun-toting criminals called Anarchy 99, and thereby save the world from total destruction, et cetera.
With the exception of sex, which is notably absent, the James Bond hokum is all in place. A plethora of bizarre gadgets assist X, as he’s called, in saving the world. The scenes in which these shiny, ridiculous instruments are demonstrated to X is a straight copy of those scenes with Bond and Q. (“Do be careful, 007.”) There are endless explosions, a lot of dashing around in fast vehicles, and death-defying stunts galore, from parachuting over a bridge to riding a nuclear submarine like a bucking bronco — this is the kind of movie with more stunt men credited than any other personnel. It’s completely mindless, and completely thrilling.
There is no humanity in it to get in the way of the action. This is, basically, a cartoon, and the notably ugly Diesel doesn’t have a hairdo at all. His head is shaved, as if to emphasise his ugliness. He is the new Sylvester Stallone, except he has more tattoos (the one on the back of his neck, his logo as it were, seems to open every scene in which he features). He looks like a thug, and his delivery is laboured. He has trouble with facial expressions — when he frowns, trying to be serious, he just looks like a baby negotiating a particularly tricky bowel movement.
The maturity level of xXx makes About a Boy, by comparison, seem practically Proustian in its emotional depth. Usually I’m annoyed by movies that have no real human centre or complexity, but it felt like a relief not to have to care about the people in xXx any more than you truly care about comic-book superheroes who will, you know, survive having the odd skyscraper dumped on their heads. The visceral-thrill quotient of xXx trumps everything else. If About a Boy is about growing up, xXx is about staying as adolescent as you possibly can. And it’s a blast.