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‘xXx: The Return of Xander Cage’ Passes The Bechdel Test

After watching xXx: The Return of Xander cage last night, I tweeted this:

I’ve seen a few people respond to this tweet by saying, “See! The Bechdel Test is meaningless!” Meanwhile, I have the opposite reaction: I’m disappointed that a lot of our greatest, most beloved films don’t have two women ever interact with each other in a meaningful way outside of the context of their relationship with men (if they have two women interacting at all).

The Bechdel Test is not a great test of a movie’s quality, but I think about it a lot and bring it up frequently because it is very difficult to think of a movie that doesn’t pass the inverse version of that test (i.e. two men talk, it’s not about a woman, etc.). The reason the Bechdel Test exists is because a huge percentage of movies we see don’t pass it. When that is no longer the norm, I’ll be happy to stop thinking about the Test.

For more thoughts on xXx: The Return of Xander Cage, see my Periscope with Matt Lynch. (Also, thanks to Lindsey Romain for pointing out that maybe The Two Towers does kinda pass?)

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