The daredevils that derive their kicks from jockeying bicycles, dirt bikes, skateboards, snowboards, or hurtling their souped-up mini-cars around closed-course race tracks are thoroughly obsessed with X-treme sports. They rarely seem concerned about breaking bones as they strive to top themselves as well as the competition. Indeed, one sportsman says as he snaps on his helmet, "I gotta go try to kill myself." The trouble with director Steve Lawrence's big-screen ESPN documentary "X-Games 3-D" (**1/2 out of ****) is that only X-treme sports enthusiasts will have the patience to sit through 92 minutes of these harebrained heroics. While the visceral thrills of watching these guys perform audacious stunts on incredible courses has some appeal, it is the lensed in 3-D look that gives it its edge. Otherwise, "X-Games 3-D" qualifies as a synthesis of hero-worship and promotional video.
Scenarists Greg Jennings and Lawrence are more concerned with allotting each participant equal time that it never occurs to them to capitalize on the competition in the games. Instead, we have interviews dispersed throughout the documentary that basically say the same thing. Meanwhile, the catchy but execrable narration would send an English teacher into fits of apoplexy. Narrator Emilie Hirsch of "Speed Racer" must have been paid well to utter such absurdities as "he treats gravity like some people do evolution, as only a theory," or "the present is past; only the future has currency." Jennings and Lawrence provide only thumbnail sketches of the participants and they rattle of those inevitable sports clichés that do little more than scratch the surface.
Lawrence descended on the 2008 X-Games in Los Angeles and deployed ten 3-D camera crews to record some 50 hours of footage. When he doesn't lens the arena events, he cross-cuts to the training regimens of his athlete. "X-Games 3-D" has its share of ups and downs like the ramps on which the skateboarders and motorcyclists perform. When the athletes are in motion, this Disney distributed documentary generates enough momentum to keep your eyes glued on them. Otherwise, there are only fleeting moments—as ABC-TV "Wild World of Sports" used to say in the 1960s—of the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Indeed, "X-Games 3-D" qualifies as a best of sports video. We never see the scoreboard that the contestants stare at after each competition. Moreover, we have no idea what the judges base their decisions on when they tabulate the numbers. Instead, Lawrence confines himself strictly to those contestants and doesn't get very far under their collective skins other than to show their fatalistic outlook.
Nevertheless, the dynamic photography is a definite plus. Sometimes, you feel like shrinking in your seat as you stare over the shoulders of the skateboarders before they plunge down steep ramps at harrowing speeds with nothing between them and the curved wooden surface of the course but gravity. Watching them leap one ramp to execute "360s" and even "520s" before touching down on another ramp is enjoyable. Sure, sometimes they land hard and lie there, but they always manage to regain their footing and limp off for another day.
The personalities in "X-Games 3-D" are pleasant enough. Nobody here behaves badly compared with the psychos in the infinitely superior 2005 documentary that Henry Alex Rubin & Dana Allen Shapiro made about paraplegic wheel chair soccer "Murderball," but then nobody here is as memorable as the "Murderball" personalities." Veteran skateboards Danny Way, 35, and Bob Burnquist, 32, look a mite long in the tooth to be doing this nonsense. Nevertheless, they perform with enviable skill and their gyrations as they soar aloft on their skateboards approaches poetry in the few moments that they defy gravity. Way jumped the Great Wall of China with a broken ankle. Twenty-two year old redheaded Shaun White alternates between skateboarding and snowboarding, while 29-year old Ricky Carmichael leaps his dirt bike 33 feet in the air over a barrier. Carmichael is casually referred to as 'GOAT' or Greatest of All Time when he performs. Travis Pastrana ranks as probably the most competitive of the bunch, struggling to complete double back flips at Moto X events on his motorcycle as well as entering Rally Car Racing. Pastrana is the craziest of them all, having broken his pelvis, back and knees, with in the words of Carmichael suffering from "too many concussions to remember." The 3-D technology and the gravity-defying stunts make "X-Games" worth watching, but the lulls between those stunts siphon off the movie's momentum. Happily, however, the action wraps up dramatically with some superlative skateboarding as Donnie Way crashes as he comes down on the ramp after a 360. The medics escort him off stage, and everybody agonizes over his absence. Miraculously, Way ignores his doctor's advice and hauls himself and his ailing foot back out to perform the 360 again and it is an impressive maneuver.
Scenarists Greg Jennings and Lawrence are more concerned with allotting each participant equal time that it never occurs to them to capitalize on the competition in the games. Instead, we have interviews dispersed throughout the documentary that basically say the same thing. Meanwhile, the catchy but execrable narration would send an English teacher into fits of apoplexy. Narrator Emilie Hirsch of "Speed Racer" must have been paid well to utter such absurdities as "he treats gravity like some people do evolution, as only a theory," or "the present is past; only the future has currency." Jennings and Lawrence provide only thumbnail sketches of the participants and they rattle of those inevitable sports clichés that do little more than scratch the surface.
Lawrence descended on the 2008 X-Games in Los Angeles and deployed ten 3-D camera crews to record some 50 hours of footage. When he doesn't lens the arena events, he cross-cuts to the training regimens of his athlete. "X-Games 3-D" has its share of ups and downs like the ramps on which the skateboarders and motorcyclists perform. When the athletes are in motion, this Disney distributed documentary generates enough momentum to keep your eyes glued on them. Otherwise, there are only fleeting moments—as ABC-TV "Wild World of Sports" used to say in the 1960s—of the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Indeed, "X-Games 3-D" qualifies as a best of sports video. We never see the scoreboard that the contestants stare at after each competition. Moreover, we have no idea what the judges base their decisions on when they tabulate the numbers. Instead, Lawrence confines himself strictly to those contestants and doesn't get very far under their collective skins other than to show their fatalistic outlook.
Nevertheless, the dynamic photography is a definite plus. Sometimes, you feel like shrinking in your seat as you stare over the shoulders of the skateboarders before they plunge down steep ramps at harrowing speeds with nothing between them and the curved wooden surface of the course but gravity. Watching them leap one ramp to execute "360s" and even "520s" before touching down on another ramp is enjoyable. Sure, sometimes they land hard and lie there, but they always manage to regain their footing and limp off for another day.
The personalities in "X-Games 3-D" are pleasant enough. Nobody here behaves badly compared with the psychos in the infinitely superior 2005 documentary that Henry Alex Rubin & Dana Allen Shapiro made about paraplegic wheel chair soccer "Murderball," but then nobody here is as memorable as the "Murderball" personalities." Veteran skateboards Danny Way, 35, and Bob Burnquist, 32, look a mite long in the tooth to be doing this nonsense. Nevertheless, they perform with enviable skill and their gyrations as they soar aloft on their skateboards approaches poetry in the few moments that they defy gravity. Way jumped the Great Wall of China with a broken ankle. Twenty-two year old redheaded Shaun White alternates between skateboarding and snowboarding, while 29-year old Ricky Carmichael leaps his dirt bike 33 feet in the air over a barrier. Carmichael is casually referred to as 'GOAT' or Greatest of All Time when he performs. Travis Pastrana ranks as probably the most competitive of the bunch, struggling to complete double back flips at Moto X events on his motorcycle as well as entering Rally Car Racing. Pastrana is the craziest of them all, having broken his pelvis, back and knees, with in the words of Carmichael suffering from "too many concussions to remember." The 3-D technology and the gravity-defying stunts make "X-Games" worth watching, but the lulls between those stunts siphon off the movie's momentum. Happily, however, the action wraps up dramatically with some superlative skateboarding as Donnie Way crashes as he comes down on the ramp after a 360. The medics escort him off stage, and everybody agonizes over his absence. Miraculously, Way ignores his doctor's advice and hauls himself and his ailing foot back out to perform the 360 again and it is an impressive maneuver.
