I guess at a certain point we’ll have to start calling Vin Diseal an auteur. Thanks to the ever-mounting success of the batshit insane ‘Fast & Furious’ franchise, the 49-year-old actor/producer has turned into a power player in Hollywood, cultivating two franchises for himself, and with this unexpected return of the barely remembered ‘xXx’ series now qualifying as a third. The directorial credit on this ludicrous sequel belongs to D.J. Caruso (‘Disturbia’), but for all intents and purposes this is a film by Vin Diesel.

The movie takes the boneheaded, X-Games era Bond knockoff and slowly transforms it into ‘Fast & Furious 7.5’. Vin’s tattoo-covered underground x-treme sports hero/secret spy gradually forms a family and flings big metal objects against each other until they explode and he’s allowed to say a cornball one-liner. It’s dumb, base level stuff, devoid of logic, reason, artistic integrity, human behavior or earthbound physics. However, it’s goddamn fun to watch another one of big Vin’s Red Bull fantasies unfold on a comically massive scale. The guy has a voice, and not just that distinctive bassy growl. He has a style of lunatic cartoon action movie that he specializes in and it works, even if it has the nutritional value of a bag of Doritos choked down with a bottle of Mountain Dew.

For those who didn’t watch the duo of forgotten ‘xXx’ movies in the early 2000s, they were about a secret NSA spy program run by Augustus Gibbons (Sam Jackson). Gibbons sought out badasses who hated The Man to do jobs the government couldn’t be connected to. Xander Cage (Diesel) was the tattooed dingbat lug who kicked butt in the first movie, then salary demands meant that he was killed off to let Ice Cube step in for the sequel. This time, the threequel kicks off with a satellite falling to Earth that kills Gibbons just as he’s about to recruit a new xXx agent. Turns out that was deliberate. Someone has a super-secret device that can crash satellites. They must be terrorists. It only makes sense.

We soon meet Jane Marke (Toni Colette), who apparently took over Gibbons’ role immediately. She holds a meeting at the CIA headquarters in New York. (I know that’s not where CIA headquarters actually is, but this is a deeply stupid movie so stay with me.) That’s when the great Donnie Yen and a gang of kun-fu terrorists show up and cause a ruckus, making it clear they have the satellite-crashing MacGuffin. Clearly, that means they’re terrorists. More importantly, Marke knows that only one man can stop them: Xander Cage, a.k.a. Vin Diesel, a.k.a. James Bond with tattoos and Axe Body Spray.

We catch up with Xander Cage in South America, where he’s been hiding out since faking his death following that contract dispute that kept him out of the sequel. He does an elaborate parkour/base-jumping/jungle-skiing/skateboarding adventure to prove that he’s still a badass and, like, totally x-treme… also to set up cable so the local villagers can watch soccer. He then bangs a model/possibly actress to prove he is a M-A-N. When Marke asks him to come back to super-spying, he agrees and finds out where the satellite thingy is while bedding more broads. Then he insists on assembling his own crew of outlaw badasses to go get it, so that this can feel even more like a ‘Fast & Furious’ flick. Sadly, Vin gives no soliloquies about family when pulling together his team. Instead, his dialogue is split between speeches about “taking down The Man” and one-liners so lame that even Arnold Schwarzenegger would have demanded a rewrite.

That’s a whole lotta convoluted plotting and it barely even gets ‘xXx 3: Triple X, Triple Sequel, Triple Stupid’ into the second act. The movie plays like a cornball soap opera that pauses in its ludicrous masquerade of storytelling only to blow something up really good, do something that resembles a joke, or ogle a delicious booty (both sexes covered). It’s B-movie absurdity pitched to the cheap seats and lavished with the sort of budget that could finance an entire Sundance programming slate. There’s no meaning to the madness. It rarely makes sense. The action scenes are normally variations on things you’ve seen before and the dialogue is the sort that a 14-year-old might craft as a parody of bad action zingers. However, just like a ‘Fast & Furious’ sequel after the masterfully silly fifth chapter, it kind of works in a guilty pleasure way.

The movie is big and colorful and fast and explosive and often hilarious, even if the laughs are rarely deliberate. No one is taking this fluff seriously. (Well, possibly Vin. It’s tough to tell if the guy is self-aware.) They all know the type of bubblegum entertainment they’re making. They’ve resigned to selling their souls away to the highest bidder and are having a blast at it.

Vin Diesel’s ego might be even larger than his neck and more unbelievable than his name, but the lug has turned into a one-man army of B-movie bliss. His ‘Fast & Furious’ movies have all the ironic entertainment value of 1990s action movie nonsense and the scale of a Marvel blockbuster. ‘xXx: Part Trois’ may as well be titled ‘Fast & Furious & Tats’. It feels like the next chapter in that franchise, just with Vin as a spy rather than a racer/criminal/heist-master/government agent/whatever the hell Toretto has become. While the action isn’t quite as slick and the cast isn’t quite as good (though it comes damn close, especially when an unexpectedly expected cameo player – given away in recent TV commercials – pops up just in time to save the day), damn can this thing intoxicate you with its unapologetic idiocy if you let your brain float away long enough to enjoy the fun. Don’t expect art or even artful entertainment. This is trash, just glorious trash well worth all the guilt required to enjoy its pleasures.