- Anvilicious: Smoking is bad for you, yes. But having a smoker get blown up by a heat-seeking missile? If it was any more on the nose, viewers would be left with bruises.
- Awesome Moments: How Xander deals with the car of asshole politician (and Jack Thompson expy) Dick Hotchkiss, first making off with it, then livestreaming himself driving it right off a high bridge, base jumping out of it and parachuting himself down in order to teach him a lesson, that lesson being "don't be a dick, Dick!"
- Awesome Music: The intro features "Feuer Frei" by the German group Rammstein. Bonus points for their cameo in the said scene.
- Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Even though the movie ultimately portrays the anarchists as evil and wrong, their hedonistic lifestyle is pretty damn awesome. Show of hands, who wouldn't want to party all night in a castle, doing whatever you want and not having to worry about being in the office in the morning?
- Harsher in Hindsight: Asia Argento playing a femme fatale becomes incredibly disturbing after Argento revealed director Rob Cohen drugged and raped her and Cohen's history of sexual abuse including of his own daughter came to light. Knowing this makes a lot of the "sexy" scenes slide into Fan Disservice.
- Hilarious in Hindsight:
- Danny Trejo menaces Cage with a machete.
- Cage at one point appears trapped in a dingy and dark holding place chained from above by his wrists. Vin Diesel winds up in a similar situation in Fast Five and The Chronicles of Riddick.
- Cage says he doesn't want to sell out and make a video game, and implies that it's also because he wouldn't get creative control in its production anyway. Diesel was later heavily involved in the production of the first TCOR video game. The studio he created made both this film and that one.
- Samuel L. Jackson as the disfigured leader of a secretive government organization. Who recruits Groot.
- Just Here for Godzilla: As with anything he appears in, Samuel L. Jackson automatically makes the movie better so it's worth watching just for his scenes.
- Memetic Mutation: "Two years? What was your plan? To let them die of old age?"
- Shallow Parody: The first movie 'parodied' the James Bond Tuxedo and Martini spy model by having an NSA agent in the opening switching his spy suit for a tux while on the run from the bad guys. He then gets assassinated when he tries to disappear into a rock concert actually held by the bad guys, because he can't blend in with the crowd. While the Bond movies did popularize this trope, Bond himself was never dumb enough to try something like this, and always dressed for the occasion. The movie implies this spy wasn't expecting a rock concert, which makes him a bad spy.
- Unintentional Period Piece: Hoo boy, where to start? From the Totally Radical Xtreme Kool Letterz title, the Nu Metal soundtrack, the focus on extreme sports and stunts (with the obligatory cameo by Tony Hawk), treating internet live streaming as something new and hip, Ripped from the Headlines social commentary about Moral Guardians see video games, rap music as well as a cameo by Eve, and extreme sports as a sign of social decay, to the subversive Take That! plot that skewers the more traditional spy films and cliches in favor of the more EXTREME Vin Diesel, the film is a perfect encapsulation of the early 2000s.
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