Fellow citizens, action fans, members of Congress, it is my sad duty to report that the state of Lee Tamahori's “XXX: State of the Union” is not strong, but wrong. Cynically, mind-clubbingly wrong.

At least the first “XXX” (2002) had a bit of style, and just a bit of brains, to back up its fundamentally idiotic premise of an extreme sports star who catches half-pipes in the name of American liberty. Alas, leading man Vin Diesel (“The Pacifier”) has moved on — to be replaced by a glowering, unappealing Ice Cube (“Are We There Yet?”) — along with director Rob Cohen, who left to make “Stealth,” a thriller about an automated fighter jet that gets struck by lightning and develops a mind of its own. By the end of “State of the Union,” it's clear that Cube would have benefited from a similar fate.

“Pulp Fiction” star Samuel L. Jackson is the lone holdover from the original movie, playing Agent Augustus Gibbons, leader of the XXX program, a super-secret chapter of the National Security Agency that has its own, super-splashy logo. When XXX headquarters are shot to pieces by assailants unknown, Gibbons shrewdly decides to jettison the agency's extreme sports doctrine.

The organization's next featured agent can't be “another skater, snowboarder or biker,” Gibbons declares, referring to the recently deceased Xander Cage (Diesel). “The new XXX has gotta be more dangerous, with more attitude.”

Translation: He's gotta be straight-up gangsta, and Gibbons finds one in Darius Stone (Cube), a former Navy SEAL currently serving time in a military prison for defying his commanding officer, George Deckert (Willem Dafoe), now the scheming secretary of defense. Deckert is plotting a bloody coup of the Oval Office, and wants Gibbons to take the fall.

Cube immediately brings what movie demographers like to call “urban credibility” to the role. After Gibbons springs him from jail, Darius spends the next few scenes scoping out shmoooove rides and re-establishing his contacts in the underground chop-shop scene (a tactical must for any world-saving secret agent). He trades lame auto-themed double entendres with an old flame (“Remember when we dropped the clutch for the first time?" or something just as obnoxious) and uses the word “teef” — as in “I'll knock your teef in!” — a grammatical no-no to which Cube was particularly prone back in his N.W.A. gangsta-rap days.

Coupled with scripter Simon Kinberg's tone-deaf wordplay, Cube's performance constitutes one of the most insulting attempts to co-opt the outlaw mystique of hip-hop culture since the debut album of Vanilla Ice. The movie plummets to historic lows when Darius rallies his chop-shop homies (including Xzibit of MTV's “Pimp My Ride”) to help save the government. When the usual patriotic arguments fail, Darius appeals to their love of freedom — specifically, “the freedom to hack and jack the finest cars.” How utterly embarrassing.

In terms of simple, visceral demolition, Tamahori (“Die Another Day”) earns his paycheck. Darius goes airborne in a speedboat, blasts the Capitol with a howitzer and, most impressive of all, executes a perfect Greg Louganis off a 500-foot bridge amid shrapnel and fireballs.
Amazingly, after all this, he suffers only a single, tiny scratch under his right eye. If only the audience could emerge so unscathed.