Let's be clear here: 2002’s xXx is not a great film. But as a cultural artefact, it’s pretty fascinating, a snapshot of a very specific time in history.
The James Bond franchise was 40 years old and seemed to be on its last legs, frantically trying to reinvent itself with CGI cars and unconvincing surf sequences. Cultural phenomena like the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games and Jackass were making household names out of scruffy, tattooed dudes with no fear of blunt-force trauma. The enormous commercial success of acts like Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park and Eminem had, in a very short amount of time, blurred the lines between rock and hip-hop, as well as broadening the idea of how ‘out there’ someone could look and still be a mainstream success. Slipknot had been on the cover of Rolling Stone ffs.
All of this, and the ever-growing extreme sports industry, led to the idea of xXx, subtitled “a new breed of secret agent”. A star vehicle for Vin Diesel, hot off the success of The Fast & The Furious, the idea was to bring the spy movie up to date by combining it with sick tribals and gnarly stunts, enormous duuuuudes and colossal amounts of fire. Diesel played Xander “xXx” Cage, an extreme sports enthusiast coerced into becoming a spy for the US government to avoid jail time.
Director Rob Cohen brought together greats from the worlds of action sports — Tony Hawk from skateboarding, Matt Hoffman from BMXing, Carey Hart from motocross — to bring credibility on that side of things, but needed something more to get across the lifestyle he was trying to portray. Which is where Rammstein came in.
Their scenes take place before anything else in the movie — before Vin Diesel drives his Corvette off the bridge, before any sign of Samuel L. Jackson, before any charmingly crap one-liners. Before any of that, Rammstein’s Feuer frei! plays over the production company’s logo and the movie’s title, leading into a sequence which functions as much as a plot point as a statement of intent.
A James Bond-like figure, Agent Jim McGrath (played by Karate Kid III and Cobra Kai star Thomas Ian Griffith) finds himself over his head in a much more gnarly world than he is used to — ducking into a Prague nightclub belonging to the movie’s baddie, of all the things to bloody find, there’s a Rammstein concert going on. He’s stuck, stranded, and his bid to escape via the stage ends in him being shot, his fall mistaken for a stage-dive and his body crowd-surfed away. Unlucky.
“A man in a tux trying to deal with a tattooed, dirty, dangerous, uncivilized world was the perfect metaphor for the beginning of this film,” says Cohen on the DVD director’s commentary.
Rammstein were the band recruited to provide exactly this dirt, danger and uncivilised-ness (they’ve got a few tattoos too here and there, though this one wasn't on show back then). The German industrial sextet were riding high at the time, with 2001’s Mutter their most successful album to date, their international success buoyed in large part by their song Du Hast (from their previous record, 1997’s Sehnsucht) being included on the multi-platinum Matrix soundtrack.
Frrom January 8-12, 2002, in a former church outside Prague, they performed their song Feuer frei! to a crowd of extras (whose timing is really not good). They shot the movie sequence and the song’s music video at the same time, with Cohen helming both.
Feuer frei! roughly translates as “fire at will”, and the song’s lyrics deal with pain, anger and lust. When released as a single, it was done so as the first single from the xXx soundtrack rather than the fifth from Mutter, although a sixth single from that album was eventually released, Mein Herz Brennt in 2012, to promote a greatest-hits collection.
To an unassuming theatregoer it potentially seemed a bit silly — surely bands don’t go launching fire around like that? But, of course, Rammstein very much do. Frontman Till Lindemann told Playboy in 2006, “we are a kind of harder David Copperfield show. Fathers visit our concerts with their children to show them good fireworks.”
Anyone scandalised by the pyrotechnic performance in the movie should be happy that Agent McGrath didn’t enter the concert during the song Buch Dich, in which rather than fire, the onstage schtick involves the keyboardist being fucked with a comically oversized dildo, a routine they have been arrested for.
The most frustrated person in the whole sequence must be the big blond henchman — he’s wearing a Rammstein shirt (visible at 1:07 and 1:14) so clearly loves the band, and they’re playing a gig right there, and he’s got to work trying to kill an American spy rather than having a few beers and enjoying his favourite band playing a way smaller room than usual. His boss owns the venue, and must have seen his shirt before. It all seems quite unfair. Like, he’s a baddie, but he’s still a fan. Maybe he got to go to soundcheck before his henchmanning shift.
Also, as one YouTube commenter has pointed out, the idea of successfully having a conversation on the phone during a Rammstein concert is possibly the least plausible thing in the whole movie.
The band haven’t discussed their appearance in xXx much in interviews, although half the band attended the London premiere. It isn’t out of the question that the movie’s politics — which, despite the fascia of tattoos and cutoff sleeves, are pretty jingoistic and conservative, with one academic deeming it “a product of Hollywood's trans-national capitalist logics and a tacit promotional vehicle for U.S. Empire that communicates a mix of globally popular elements and nationalist imperialist ideology” — were a source of disappointment for the band, who have been very critical of nationalism and US cultural imperialism in songs like Amerika and Mein Land.
(They may have discussed xXx more than we think, to be fair: it's just that their later forays into making actual pornography do distort the results somewhat when trawling through archives.)
The rest of the movie’s soundtrack is a real time-capsule combination of nu-metal and dance music — there’s Mushroomhead, Drowning Pool (see clip below) and Hatebreed, but also Moby — along with a Queens Of The Stone Age song. There’s also a second disc, entitled The Xander Xone, purporting to be a hip-hop mixtape put together by Cage to psych himself up before performing big-ass stunts. James Bond never did that.
Rammstein aren’t the only musicians in the movie. Rapper Eve appears as a friend of Cage, while Buckcherry frontman Josh Todd is very briefly seen in a crowd scene. A later club scene features an appearance by Orbital. A cameraman is played by Mike Vallely, who was there in the capacity of his day job as one of the greatest skateboarders in history, but these days is also the frontman/manager of Black Flag (and is the second longest-serving member despite not appearing on any of their records. But that's a whole other story.)
But it’s Rammstein’s movie. They’re how the world the film inhabits is established: this isn’t your grandpa’s spy movie, these enormous Germans are on fire.
