Summer Movie Catch-Up: Josh Reviews G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
Growing up, my two favorite cartoons, by an order of magnitude, were The Transformers and G.I. Joe. That makes it sort of hard to believe that this summer saw the release of a live-action, big-budget movie version of both of those beloved (by me, at least!) old TV shows.
Wish I could say either one of them was any good!
Although, I must confess that I enjoyed G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra way more than I expected to, and a good deal more than the really undeniably terrible Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I mean, take a look at these two trailers:
Doesn’t Transformers look awesome, and G.I. Joe pretty terrible? But the reality is that G.I. Joe wound up being a far-more entertaining and coherent film.
Heh. Coherent. That’s a funny word to use to describe G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, a film that is completely over-the-top and ridiculous from the first frame to the last. But, whereas Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was a film that made absolutely not one lick of sense (and click here if you don’t believe me), with nothing even remotely resembling a logical progression from one scene to the next, G.I. Joe is actually a pretty straightforward adventure film.
Army grunts Duke (Channing Tatum) and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) witness the complete annihilation of their convoy by a highly advanced terrorist organization, and get swept up in the efforts of G.I. Joe, an elite multi-nation fighting force, to stop the bad guys.
Again, I realize the silliness of my calling this film “straightforward.” Though it’s live-action, this movie is a complete cartoon, filled with soap-opera entanglements for almost all of the main characters and one crazily insane action sequence after another. But in contrast to Transformers, there is a coherency to the plot. There is some sense as to how one event leads into the next, and while I had to check imdb to figure out some characters’ names (for instance, I had no idea that Lost‘s Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje was supposed to be Heavy Duty), I didn’t have any trouble telling any of the myriad good guys and bad guys apart from one another (again, in marked contrast to Transformers).
The actors all seem to be having a lot of fun, and the cast is, for the most part, pretty solid. I have never really understood the need for comic relief characters in films like this, but Marlon Wayans’ Ripcord isn’t too terribly annoying. Channing Tatum’s Duke is fairly stiff, but I guess he’s supposed to be. Dennis Quaid (looking more and more like Harrison Ford with each passing year) chews great scenery as General Hawk. (I wish his character had more to do in the film.) Ray Park has some pretty awesome moves as Snake Eyes. His was the character I was most giddy seeing brought to life, and I was pleased that the filmmakers didn’t shy away from the craziness of having a silent ninja dressed in black on their team of Joes. Rachel Nichols is a lot of fun to watch and looks great as Scarlett (though I could have done without the flirtation from Ripcord subplot). Said Taghmaoui is much funnier and likeable as Breaker than Marlon Wayans is as Ripcord.
On the Cobra side of things, Sienna Miller is gorgeous as the Baroness, though I doubt this performance will make her Oscar reel. Her fight scenes are fun, though. Arnold Vosloo is gleefully evil as Zartan, and Christopher Eccleston conveys great menace (without going too far into camp) in the role of the arms dealer McCullen. (I won’t spoil for you which well-known character he becomes towards the end of the film, though if you haven’t figured it out by the end of the film’s prologue then I just don’t know what to say to you.) Speaking of characters who turn into famous G.I. Joe bad-guys, there is Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the Doctor, totally unrecognizable under mechanical appliances and make-up. This is the character who strayed the farthest from the familiar G.I. Joe iconography, and I wish they had stuck closer to the source material here. Conversely, Byung-hun Lee is just as perfect as Storm Shadow as Ray Park is as Snake Eyes.
I really don’t have much more to say about this movie. It’s rather juvenile and stupid, but fairly entertaining in its stupidity. If you grew up with the cartoon, as I did, then it’s worth a peek, though I can’t imagine that this is a film I will wind up seeing again any time soon…