I have not seen too many movies this summer. Maybe more than most people (4), but maybe because 3 of those 4 movies were of less than stellar quality it feels like I've only seen 1 or 2. Fortunately, the overall shittiness of X-Men Origins: Wolverine set the bar nice and low when approaching subsequent films like Terminator Salvation and the AMC classic I watched last night G.I.Joe: The Rise of Cobra. If anyone is interested, Star Trek was the one good movie I saw this summer, and since Paramount put out that film and G.I. Joe, I rationalized before the first retarded scene of the latter film that maybe everything was going to be all right? Oh wait, I just looked at that above picture again.
To be honest, I actually did enjoy elements of the film, and basically enjoyed the film in summary (certain details were horrible). Unlike Michael Bay's Transformers films this one doesn't take itself seriously at all, and randomly pays homage to the toys and cartoons of G.I. Joe, Bond films, video games like Halo, and batshit crazy action movies with bad CGI, like The Mummy series of films, also directed by G.I.Joe director Stephen Sommers.
Excess is the name of the game, and this movie delivers, with tons of explosions, lasers, nonsensical plot twists, characters that seemed to be named in post-production because they sorta resembled a particular G.I. Joe toy, and an end sequence straight out of Bond that manages to just fall below the Star Wars prequels level of cramming a lot of shit onto one screen. Whenever I tried to call out a plothole, like "Where's Snake-Eyes? They forgot about Snake-Eyes?" POW! There's Snake-Eyes, he was just chilling under that car the whole time. "Where's Zartan?" BAM! He was offscreen for 40 minutes... uh, taking a nap or something. This movie barely squeaks by, which in this day and age of me being exhausted by comic book movies and not even bothering to see most generic action movies, says a lot.
The basic plot of the film (not that it's important) is that Destro is descended from a Scottish clan of weapons dealers who, unlike Iron Man, decide to use their weapons dealing for evil purposes (imagine that!). Destro creates a weapon based on Nanomites that can do anything, but mostly will be used to eat metal objects and occasionally fuck with people. Channing Tatum and Marlon Wayans are suppposed to deliver this suitcase full of Nanomite warheads but get intercepted by The Baroness, played by Sienna Miller, who's way too L.A. and not enough Eastern European. It's like they saw a picture of The Baroness and were like "brunette in glasses, check.", but I digress. Marlon Wayans and Tatum, who are supposed to be Joes but basically act like themselves, get scooped up into G.I. Joe, and the games begin. Snake-Eyes and Storm Shadow fight a bunch, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a better Dr. Mindbender than Cobra Commander, and a sleepy Brendan Frasier pops up to hang out.
What's so shocking again is that I didn't hate this movie, Sommers has a way of making these movies that are like "I know this is silly, you're the one watching it though.". There's a sloppy tightwire act going on in this film where every time you think the guy is going to fall off he corrects himself or falls and bounces off the trampoline below back on the wire that's a hundred feet up in the air. It's clownshoes, pure and simple, and instead of looking for a serious adaptation of an '80s toyline, realize that you're watching a movie made for 10-year old kids to get them to drink the Hasbro Kool-Aid like many of us guys did 20-25 years ago. The 10-year old me loved it, the me who's pushing 30 basically felt drunk afterwards from all the shit that was thrown at me. Now I know how my parents felt when I watched the original G.I. Joe cartoon movie (Cobra Lalalalalala!) over and over again.
