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Obviously the new trailer for xXx: The Return of Xander Cage was never going to be serious - Vin Diesel's series is known for its tray-skating levels of glorious dumb action padding. This new instalment, however, ups the stupid to amazing, brilliant heights.
I'll drop the trailer in at the bottom so you can see the whole thing but let's focus on the physics-fucking moments that would make the baby Stephen Hawking cry.
That's not how the conservation of momentum works
It just isn't.
This is not skiing. This is dying with equipment attached
Skiers, when they're crazy enough to do this, have the comforting knowledge that there's a few meters of soft snow to iron out the kinks that usually occur when people and falling are mixed.
Here? Not so much. The laws of terminal velocity mean that the only way this should end is a with confused policemen trying to work out how he's going to explain the skis in an incident report.
Except...
Trees are some how an adequate replacement for snow on planet xXx
Maybe, maybe you'd get one good bounce off a single tree, but realistically the laws of friction would see anything that follows struggle to be anymore than a sudden and crunchy stop. Try skimming a biscuit across a quarry if you want to recreate this in our world.
Actually, this one might work...
I mean it wouldn't. You'd probably bounce off the bus and tumble down the road like a well thrown handful of wet mince. But it's actually one of the few bits of the trailer that isn't theoretically impossible. The rest of it though all hangs on the ability of Vin Diesel's dubious upper body strength to hold himself and the skateboard against the car with one arm while steering.
Oh for fuck's sake
If anyone could actually ride a bike fast enough to go across water they'd leave rainbows behind them as the speed of light buckled under the pressure. No combination of surface tension and road tyres is making this work, especially the 'jumping a wave like a ramp' bit.
DO YOU EVEN UNDERSTAND HOW WATER WORKS, VIN DIESEL?
In short, it looks incomprehensibly amazing. Check out the full trailer to put the madness in some paper thin context.
Directed by D.J. Caruso and starring Vin Diesel, Samuel L. Jackson, Nina Dobrev, Kris Wu, Ruby Rose, and Donnie Yen, xXx: The Return of Xander Cage will open in the UK and US on January 20, 2017.
