11
Justin does G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
Posted by Justin
“Make the call.”
The Scoop: 2009 PG-13, directed by Stephen Sommers and starring Christopher Eccleston, Channing Tatum and Sienna Miller
Tagline: When All Else Fails, They Don’t
Summary Capsule: G.I. Joe gets the boot… a reboot, with Destro trying to eat all the metal in the world and Duke joining the Joes for the first time (wait, isn’t he supposed to be the leader?).
Justin’s Rating: The other half of the battle are really big lips. Tell no one!
Justin’s Review: First things first: if at no point during a film does the panicked phrase “COBRA retreat!” spout from any enemy’s mouth, it’s not a G.I. Joe movie. It may walk like a Joe, squawk like a Joe, but it’s an imposter Joe at the core. Not to say that Stephen Sommers didn’t make the most of a promising franchise revival in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, because for a bad film, it’s actually fairly watchable – and it has enough Joe qualities in it to keep the hardcore fans from rioting outright. And it teaches us new things about ice, such as the fact that it sinks if it’s big enough! Whoda thunk it?
Like many a geek who grew up loving various cartoon and movies in the 80’s, I’m a mixture of appalled and attracted to Hollywood’s neverending attempt to refashion them into a lucrative revival for today’s audiences. Attracted because, hey, it harkens us back to our youth and gives us hope that this will be a worthy entry into something started long ago. Appalled because it almost never is – Michael Bay has absolutely ruined Transformers, bringing it to the lowest common denominator, and Summers uses the same overloud, overbusy action direction to cover up for what is a pretty flimsy story.
G.I. Joe is now a worldwide special forces unit (I guess they’re not the “real American heroes” any longer…) with crazy amounts of highly advanced technology, who have been formed to be the “best of the best, etc., we’re so awesome we crap perfection”. There’s also a ninja – which comes standard in every military outfit these days – who has a mask with lips because there’s nothing more disturbing than thinking that the person behind the mask has lips so big the mask had to be deformed to accommodate. They also have a base that’s so over-the-top ridiculous – it has a pool large enough to accommodate practice submarine warfare in the middle of the Sahara desert, I kid you not – that James Bond is flat-out green with envy.
It’s a good thing that a weapons manufacturer (Christopher Eccleston) and his Cobra cronies have constructed an equally large and impractical base – this one below the polar ice cap – so that the Joes have someone to play with. Cobra invades the Joe base, the Joes respond in kind, and in the middle of all this is a whole lot of passing and interception of a weapons case carrying metal-eating nanites.
Our entrance into this insane world of Joes is relatively normal military guys Duke and Ripcord, and I must warn you that a Wayans brother plays one of these roles. Prepare to feel an involuntary shudder flash up your spine. The two troopers more or less get recruited by the Joes and pulled into their petty squabbles amid $5.6 trillion of military hardware. Rocket packs, laser guns, VTOL planes, and, of course, the infamous “accelerator suits”, which I suppose were fashioned because Stephen Sommers wanted to appeal to the Halo crowd.
The Joes are reduced to a feature-friendly half-dozen: Hawk, Scarlett, Snake Eyes, Heavy Duty (yeah, I never heard of him either), and Breaker. For its part, COBRA is even less staffed: they have Storm Shadow (the “other” ninja, because ninjas always fight in pairs), Cobra Commander, Destro, Zartan and the Baroness. COBRA also has a lot of nanite-controlled faceless soldiers, but alas, no BATs (that’s “Battle Android Trooper” for you G.I. Joe neophytes).
I’ve got to say, I am beyond tired of two of the most common tropes in these good guys/bad guys films. The first is when a good guy turns out to be a bad guy who betrays them all, and the second is when a bad guy who spends 97% of the film being evil suddenly turns to good right before the end credits. If you’re good, be good. If bad, be bad. None of this namby-pamby team-changing nonsense. G.I. Joe commits both of these sins within its two hour running time.
What pretty much all of these revival films completely miss is that these franchises actually had depth, and story, and characterization in their source material. It wasn’t just about toys and blue lasers and explosions (although those were fun), but about Cobra Commander’s unending hissy fits, the insane amounts of crazy vehicles the Joes had at their disposal, and the slew of terrific military-themed soldiers who brought their particular expertise to the battlefield. Dumbing them down to this level leaves you with a clear, distilled experience that has no body, no flavor, no aftertaste. It’s just there and gone, asking you to take gulp after gulp in hopes that something might stick.
What’s the most frustrating thing for real fans of these franchises is that movies end up being the definitive legacy that’s remembered in the minds of most everyone else – not the books or the comics or the TV shows. X-Men will always be “that movie with Halle Berry”, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will always recall visions of Vanilla Ice, and Transformers will be about robot cars trying to molest Megan Fox. That’s it.
That said, just about two-thirds of this film consists of action sequences, so if you just need to shut your brain off and watch characters shoot, kick, slice and explode their way to victory, then this is the fast food equivalent to sate your hunger. At the very least, I expect to be able to follow the action in an action movie, and the cuts and special effects are certainly done well enough to make that the case here. It’s not particularly memorable, clever or funny (the previews before the film made us laugh more than the forced attempts at humor here), but it’s not nearly as bad as the whole anti-Joe hype made it out to be.
"I'm player one!" "Forget you, I'M player one!"
Didja Notice?
- To “weaponize” a nanite warhead means to shoot it with lasers until it becomes glowy. It’s pretty much like throwing a burrito into a microwave.
- What can a huge fat Bhudda guy teach anybody about being a ninja? Apparently not much, since he gets stabbed by a six-year-old.
- If your team gets arrested by the French police, then you might as well disband as a unit. There’s no going back after that point.
- This movie needs to cut ALL of its flashbacks, thankyouverymuch.
- Am I the only one who thought the advanced COBRA guns shot like the Stormtroopers’ blasters set on stun from A New Hope? Am I that geeky?
- Brendan Fraser!
- Guess Cover Girl wasn’t slated for the sequel…
Groovy Quotes
General Hawk: Technically, we don’t exist. We answer to no one. And when all else fails, we don’t.
Duke: Ok, that was crazy… What happened to you?
Ripcord: I went through the train. What happened to you?
Duke: I jumped over it.
Ripcord: [pause] You can do that?
If You Liked This Movie, Try These:
No Firefly? Screw it; I’m not goin’.
Firefly may not appear in the movie, but he shows up in the tie-in game as one of the bosses.
As for this movie, it seems as though it will be a piece of toast slathered with cheese, and that’s all I expect from it.
>>Firefly may not appear in the movie, but he shows up in the tie-in game as one of the bosses.<<
And an unlockable playable to boot! As does Beachhead! Ergo, the game is automatically better than the movie, which is really saying something, because the game is crap.
I rented the game recently and didn’t mind it much, but I can see why it draws so many complaints. I honestly think the game would work much better on a handheld system as it strikes me as something that is best played in short bursts rather than a prolonged time period.
Add A Comment