Vin Diesel's Xander Cage offered audiences an edgier spin on spy movie heroes than the James Bond series, and it spoofed the super-spy in its first scene. The Xander Cage franchise started in 2002, and the original aimed to put a more up-to-date spin on the genre than Pierce Brosnan's more traditional James Bond adventures offered at the time.
Followed by State of the Union in 2005 - which replaced Diesel with Ice Cube's Darius Stone - and The Return of Xander Cage in 2017, the first film centered around Vin Diesel’s glowering hero Xander Cage, an extreme-sports practitioner who turned his passion for stunts into a career as an NSA agent. To distinguish Xander from his obvious inspiration James Bond, the secret agent was tattooed and casually dressed, far from the suited, clean-shaven 007.
In comparison with the self-consciously hip Xander Cage series, the Bond franchise was looking pretty corny and outdated in the early 2000s, thanks to the success of Austin Powers and the winking, self-referential humor of Brosnan’s tenure as Bond. The release of 2002's campy misfire Die Another Day didn't help that perception, so when the first Xander Cage movie arrived in cinemas starring one of The Fast and The Furious' breakout stars as a more modern secret agent, it was almost inevitable it would spoof Bond’s out-of-date stylings. However, Diesel's movie went one step further by killing off its 007 proxy in the opening scene.
The first scene focuses on one of Xander’s fellow NSA agents, who is clad in a tuxedo and played by Karate Kid III villain Thomas Ian Griffith. The Bond-like character is soon chased into a Rammstein concert of all things and swiftly killed by the movie’s main villains as if to prove that a pre-Daniel Craig 007 wasn’t equipped to handle the challenges Xander would confront. Ironically, later Bond movies would see 007 indulge in parkour, krav maga, and all manner of Xander Cage-style stunts, and often beat the latter series at its own (spy) game.
Of course, this opening served a narrative purpose in the first Xander Cage outing in addition to being a broad, thematic refutation of Bond’s debonair style of espionage. This agent’s death is what prompts Samuel L Jackson's Augustus Gibbons to recruit Diesel's Cage in the first place, with the rest of the plot reiterating the point that the new millennium required a new breed of spy. That said, the opening was first and foremost a not-so-subtle parody intended to illustrate that a James Bond-style agent was ill-equipped for the modern era, and thus justify the existence of Cage.