G.I. Joe – The Rise of Cobra
What do you get when you cross one of the most successful toy lines of the 20th century with a script starved Hollywood? Well, right, Transformers, but what else? Monopoly: The Movie? Well yeah, that too is in the works. I’m talking about G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Somewhere, someone thought it would be a good idea to turn the cartoon based on a series of action figures into a summer movie. I wouldn’t say it’s awful, but ‘good’ escapes the list of acceptable adjectives.
Here’s the rundown. Duke (Channing Tatum) and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) are a couple of Army jarheads who, along with a squad of doomed soldiers, are tasked with delivering 4 nanotechnology based warheads to NATO headquarters. On the way, they’re ambushed by a terrorist team who seem to be leaps and bounds ahead of the army in technology. The first thing that came to mind was why these guys, with obviously superior weaponry, would bother trying to take these warheads to begin with. Duke and Rip barely survive the firefight before a special ops team shows up to save the case of warheads and force the terrorists to retreat. Dressed from head to toe in black spandex and leather (are those military issue?) each of Joes introduce themselves and General Hawk (a holographic Dennis Quaid) to the two rookies and take them back to their super secret base.
Meanwhile, the terrorists, lead by the warhead’s creator, James McCullen (Christopher Eccleston), confers with The Doctor (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Baroness (Sienna Miller) and the dressed-in-white “look! I’m right here!” ninja Storm Shadow (Lee Byung-hun) to recover, weaponize and use the warheads to… sigh… take over the world. C’mon. You can pull that kinda of plot in a kids cartoon or video game, but not for film. Not unless you’re intending some kind of campy-ness, and this doesn’t.
The one thing G.I. Joe has going for it are some impressive sword fights. Good-guy ninja Snake Eyes (silently played by Ray Park) takes on bad-guy ninja Storm Shadow a few times, including during a flashback scene as children. They’re actually pretty intense and aren’t short on martial arts coolness, minus the wire-fu.
The plot otherwise is a dud. Even the special effects are on the dull side. I could swear that a scene actually reuses an effects shot from the first Transformers movie, replacing the robots with our two heroes in “Accelerator Suits”. The irony in all this sub-par film making of late is that ticket sales, particularly in the first week, tend to skyrocket, incentive enough to make sequel after sequel. G.I. Joe is no exception.
Take it from me, if it’s not too late. There’s no reason to rush out just to hear Dennis Quaid elicit his troops to yell out “Knowing is half the battle!”. Now that you know, skip the battle altogether.
