A Review of GI-Joe: It Wasn’t That Bad

Seriously, GI-Joe The Rise of Cobra Commander was not a terribly bad movie at all. It must have been the fact that I lowered my expectations of the movie before seeing it but still it’s not one of those movies where you ask for your money back ten minutes in. The movie has garnered quite a bit of negative press since the first test screenings and most likely will be the biggest box office bomb in the summer of 2009. Possibly the biggest bomb in all of 2009 but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The bad press this movie has gotten has ranged from the director Stephen Sommers getting fired to receiving the lowest score in <a href = "http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2009/06/gi_joe_looking_like_a_bomb_of.html" “>test screening history. Even the actors are not confident in the movie and are probably already shunning their work. In a couple of years when you ask Channing Tatum about behind the scenes of the movie his response will be, “GI-Who?” Even Paramount, the studio behind the movie is trying to shy it away from the spotlight. As you can read in this article they did not screen this movie to critics in fear of getting even more bad reviews.

I don’t really care about the bad buzz this movie has gotten in the past few months because the only reason why I wanted to watch this movie was to see Ray Park kick ass as Snake Eyes. I went yesterday which was opening day to see how terrible it was and to my surprise, it wasn’t that bad. There were a few good things the movie had to offer like Sienna Miller and one of my favourite actors, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and…well alright, the movie did not have a lot to offer. It was pretty much riddled with one bad idea after another but the action kind of made up for it.

What I hated most about the movie are all the freakin’ flash backs I had to watch to get the background of the story. Fans of GI-Joe would already be familiar with the characters but I am not a fan of GI-Joe so I don’t really know much about any of them. The whole entire flashback ordeal was pretty much like an episode of Lost. You know in pretty much almost all the episodes of Lost, they put in all these random flashbacks to give you a background of what the episode is about and then they can introduce another stupid plot twist? Yea it’s exactly like that and they don’t even make the transition from the present to the past subtle, they just just zoom into the character’s face and then the flashback starts. The way they transition it is so bad except for when they do Snake Eyes, that transition was alright.

I also didn’t like the random stupid one-liners said by the characters. They were really unnecessary and sometimes they just interrupted the mood. They’re not like those funny one-liners that Ryan Reynolds had in Blade III. I’m talking about those lines that state the obvious and then the other lines that re-inforce the obvious. It’s a good thing though they kept the comic relief to a minimum because I would have left the theatre if they had Ripcord (Marlon Wayons cracking all the jokes every five minutes.

The most important part of the movie which is the writing and the acting were terrible. We all know it but who really cares about that when we know this is an action movie and we know this movie will suck. I certainly did not care about it. You can figure out the entire story within the first ten minutes of the movie when the commandos get attacked by the Baroness. She is hot, I mean it is Sienna Miller but she really has to take more acting classes because she can’t play the bad guy. The whole entire repenting thing that she does at the end of the movie to save Duke’s life was very surprising. I did not know how bad the acting could get until I saw Sienna Miller switch sides. It basically goes like this: The Baroness captures Duke and then they take Duke away to turn him into a nano-tech warrior that is controlled by the doctor (aka Cobra Commander) but as she sees them taking Duke away, we see flashbacks of her and Duke making out and being in love. After about thirty seconds of these flashbacks, she switches sides and saves Duke’s life. WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?!?!?! Come on that has got to be the worst acting ever and also worst writing ever. It would have been better if Duke kissed her and then she started getting all these flashbacks and what not. Anyways, to make it more plausible, turns out she was injected with nanites so she wasn’t doing all these bad things willingly. Once you get past the terrible acting and the bad writing, I guess all you can hope for are the action sequences which were alright. I know that many people didn’t like the trailer when they saw the Joes being suited up with accelerator suits but those suits were used in only one scene and that was the Paris scene when the Eiffel tower gets destroyed. That was the only time those suits were used and thank God it was the only time (unfortunately that was about twenty minutes).

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I was dissapointed with the amount of screen time Ray Park had. I was very excited to see Snake Eyes yield his sword like a pro but unortunately he was in only three cool scenes. The first fight with Storm Shadow, the Paris scene where he chases Storm Shadow and the Baroness, and the final showdown between him and Storm Shadow. The fighting was cool but there was not enough of it. There was like only like five minutes of actual fighting between the two and there wasn’t anything really cool about it like in Episode I as Ray Park kicked ass as Darth Maul. They should have given them a more epic fight scene or put Snake Eyes in a pit with like 100 cobra commandos and watch him work his dual sword magic.

I was really unsure of the plotline too. The Baroness being Cobra Commander’s sister…I thought she was his wife or something like that. Also, Duke had a relationship with the Baroness before she turned into a bad guy? Really? Did that happen in the original series? Ripcord has a thing for Scarlett and always puts the moves on her?
Even the storyline with Snake Eyes I was unsure of. It was the least realistic storyline as it seems like Snake Eyes was a homeless white boy in Japan. How does that happen? An homeless white boy in Japan. The rest of that storyline is good though. He takes a vow of silence after his master is killed by another student whom was Storm Shadow. They were both pupils of the same master but turns out their master liked the white boy better and Storm Shadow got pissed, so he killed him.

Well I guess you can say hat this movie was bad, but it wasn’t terribly bad. You just have to dumb yourself down to a very low level to enjoy this I guess. The action was pretty much the only thing that kind of saved this movie. Just like Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. If you liked that movie, then I guess you wouldn’t hate GI-Joe. They’re both action packed films where the acting/writing take a back seat. Also, do NOT get me started on Dennis Quaid as General Hawk…just don’t.