To examine G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra with a serious eye is a complete waste of time. “It’s big dumb fun. What did you expect?” is what the kids will say as they unknowingly insult and disparage the film in an attempt to make an excuse for its flaws. Traditionally that excuse holds no water in the real world, but this time I will give them part one of that statement; G.I. Joe certainly is dumb, but to call it fun is a leap I’m unwilling to take.
As someone that grew up playing with “G.I. Joe” action figures and watching the cartoon I fully expected to enjoy this excursion into absurdity as a group of six of my friends and I descended upon Seattle’s Cinerama theater for a midnight showing following Paramount’s barring of the critical masses. The trailers promised immense action and outlandish characters as the title promised the rise of the terrorist organization I recognized from my childhood. I didn’t care about the mythology, all I cared about was a cohesive story, a little intelligence and a plot that made sense. Unfortunately I got flashbacks of 8-year-old ninjas and unknown East African wars, love quadrangles and more nanotechnology than any one person should ever have to encounter in their lifetime. While the film is absurd it tries to be smart and while it’s trying to be smart it’s just plain embarrassing.
Directed by Stephen Sommers (The Mummy franchise), G.I. Joe revolves around the story of McCullen (Christopher Eccleston), a double-crossing Scottish arms dealer and his weaponized nanotechnology, which when deployed can eat away an entire city much like the way the CGI Gort in Fox’s remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still tried last year. On the side of the good guys is the international military unit known as G.I. Joe, a unit with every technology known (and unknown) to man at their disposal and we get a first hand glimpse at all of it. Why does the team’s ninja still fight with swords when they have all this technology? I have no idea, but asking questions of this crock pot of stupidity would drive you crazy so it’s best to roll with it or ignore it. I’m still trying to figure out how they managed to build a massive underwater city of metal at the north pole several yards beneath what they described as ten stories of ice. Not to mention the other one beneath the Egyptian desert. If you can explain those two to me I would be most grateful.
There’s no need to comment on the acting other than to say Joseph Gordon-Levitt must have had a clause in his contract granting the filmmakers only brief looks at his actual face in an attempt to hide all involvement in a picture that will do nothing for his career. Marlon Wayans was, as expected, brought on to play the role of the “goofy guy” who occasionally falls down and tries to woo Scarlett (Rachel Nichols) when he isn’t having to speak Celtic in order to get the guns on his CGI aircraft to work. You see, the ship was designed by a Scottish arms dealer so Celtic voice commands only make sense. Sheesh!
Popular franchise catchphrases such as “Yo Joe!” and “half the battle” are all there in an effort to appease the target audience, and it does make reason for a laugh if that was the goal. Then again, the Hasbro logo at the beginning of the film also served as the source for laughter in my showing so I’m not sure what any of that means. Filled with CGI and edited in such a way that you can only assume they didn’t think you cared what was going on as long as you assumed something was going on, G.I. Joe is the mess many expected it to be, but hoped it wouldn’t. Not even in its sequel set up does the film deliver on its title, the trailers offer shortened versions of every battle sequence and any resemblance to the cartoon I used to watch is non-existent.
I felt there were only two possible ways for this film to truly break out and impress audiences. The first was to stick extraordinarily close to what the cartoon offered up and ham it up all the way, or take it deadly serious, cast someone other than a Wayans brother and bring in an on-the-cusp director like Peter Berg to give it a shot. Instead, we get Sommers and a middle of the road actioner that neither commits to its lunacy nor takes itself serious enough to appeal to any one approach by the audience.
Saying it’s a notch above the horrendous Van Helsing Sommers delivered in 2004 is giving it almost no credit whatsoever. G.I. Joe supremely failed to live up to my “popcorn entertainment” expectations and those expectations weren’t set very high. As a result, I can’t help but believe Stephen Sommers’ next film better be a massive hit or he will be the one directing straight-to-DVD movies rather than producing them. This was his first directing gig in five years and it certainly wasn’t worth the wait.
