After seeing Donnie Yen as the blind, battle-hardened warrior-monk Chirrut Imwe in Rogue One, we are clamoring for more. Thankfully, we won’t have to wait very long to see Yen lay the smackdown on the silver screen again because the actor is starring in xXx: Return of Xander Cage, which hits theaters on January 20, 2017. The third entry in the over-the-top action thriller franchise finds Vin Diesel returning to the role of Xander Cage, a stuntman turned secret agent who returns from self-imposed exile to find a superweapon called “Pandora’s Box” before it’s too late. Yen plays another highly trained ass-kicker named Xiang who finds himself racing against time to find the superweapon before Xander Cage can. As you’ll see in our exclusive featurette above, Xiang isn’t going to go easy on Cage — and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
In world where there are seven Fast and Furious movies and an eighth on the way, you would think that there aren’t any action set pieces left that haven’t already been done. Then the xXx: Return of Xander Cage trailer came along and I promptly ate my words. Honestly any movie that includes playing Russian roulette with an unpinned grenade and riding motorcycles on jet skis is something that I’m going to need to put into my eyeballs.
Now if we could only convince Donnie Yen to come play Dungeons & Dragons with us like his xXx co-star Vin Diesel did…
Will you be seeing xXx: Return of Xander Cage? Let us know in the comments below!
Image: Paramount Pictures
Dan Casey is the senior editor of Nerdist and the author of books about Star Wars and the Avengers. Follow him on Twitter and ask him about all things anime (@Osteoferocious).