Movie Reviews

42 Reasons Why “G.I. Joe” is Awesomely Bad

by EJ Feddes Views: 12


  1. There’s a weapons manufacturer named Destro, even though they don’t really call him that and he lacks his signature metal mask and wrist-rockets. Anyway, he builds warheads full of nanotechnology that eats everything in its path. Except, apparently for the glass and metal container that they’re stored in.
  2. Also, he sells these warheads to NATO. You know, for their arsenal.
  3. And since Destro’s actually a bad guy, he then initiates a lengthy and ridiculous plan to steal his warheads back for his own use. Instead of, you know, just keeping them and using them.
  4. Besides that, a big hunk of the story involves attempts to “weaponize” the warheads. First, they probably don’t need to make some poor schmuck weaponize the warheads at gunpoint, since presumably Destro knows how to work the things that he made. Second, isn’t a warhead already weaponized, simply by virtue of being a warhead? I feel like that’s as weaponized as things get.
  5. Dear Stephen Sommers,
Nanotechnology does not work that way.
Sincerely,
Science
  1. For some reason, several of the characters have codenames before they ever signed up with G.I. Joe. Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes use those names in a flashback when they’re children, and apparently Ripcord’s friends have always called him Ripcord.
  2. There is, no fooling around, a character in the movie named “Dr. Mindbender”.
  3. And believe it or not, this movie is actually produced by Hasbro. Who even knew they had a functioning film production arm?
  4. Somebody decided that Channing Tatum was a viable leading man, despite being completely inexpressive and mumbly.
  5. Also, Marlon Wayans is in this movie. Marlon Wayans, people.
THING I LIKED – There are a couple of good performances here. Mr. Eko from Lost (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) has a role as “Heavy Duty”, and he gets to be huge and awesome. Another former Lostie, Said Taghmaoui (the ill-fated Caesar) has some scenes as Breaker, and he gets a decent laugh or two. And Christopher Eccleston (Dr. Who, Heroes) is really quite good as Destro, even if he’s not quite Destro.
  1. Oh, this is a movie about G.I. Joe, and they even mention Cobra in the freaking name of the movie, only the organization they’re fighting is never referred to as Cobra. In fact, the name only comes up at the very end, right before the lead villains surrender. Awesome, right?  Cobra is certainly rising, there.
  2. Why the hell is a multi-national special ops group, not owing allegiance to any one nation, named after a slang term for American servicemen?
  3. So, the bad guys have developed viable, workable mind control. Destro manufactures 70% of the world’s weaponry. Tell me, why do they even bother with the warheads? Aren’t they already running the world?
  4. Two words: Accelerator Suits.
  5. To be more specific, building a major action scene around something that has no basis in G.I. Joe mythology and sticks out like a sore thumb even in this smorgasbord of crazy. It makes it seem like they repurposed a script that was written before they got the G.I. Joe license.
  6. And in the big Paris fight scene, their reckless disregard clearly causes the deaths of thousands of innocent Parisians. There are people in those cars you blew up, dick!
  7. Since the nanotech warheads devour everything in their path and spread quickly, why does not-quite-Cobra have to get the Eiffel Tower into their sights before they launch? Why not just launch it any old place and let it spread?
  8. And after they made such a big deal about the accelerator suits having machine gun hands, why wouldn’t you shoot the guy launching a missile at the Eiffel Tower instead of sprinting at him for a tackle?
  9. If you’re a filmmaker, you should think twice before doing the ground-level shot of terrified civilians running from a world-famous landmark. Because when that really happened, it was not awesome. At all.
  10. Did you know the French police have jurisdiction over a multi-national special ops group? I was surprised by that, too.
THING I LIKED: Rachel (“Scarlett”) Nichols is really pretty. I encourage Hollywood to put her in more movies.
  1. They say “Knowing is half the battle” not once, but twice!
  2. At one point, Breaker reads a dead guy’s mind by jamming metal rods into his brain. Somebody wrote that scene, and it made it all the way to the final cut. It’s amazing, really.
  3. When the bad guys attack the Joe’s secret base, only five or six guys respond to the alarm, despite the fact that there are hundreds of highly-trained people barracked there.
  4. Zartan, the master of disguise, accomplishes his disguises by putting on other people’s clothing, and sometimes standing next to their dead bodies. I can’t count the number of times I’ve borrowed a friend’s shirt and been mistaken for them.
  5. Just about everybody in this movie turns out to be related. It’s sort of like how Sommers’ Van Helsing should have been a movie about a guy who fights werewolves, vampires, and Frankensteins, but then there was all this nonsense about a family curse and (I think) a magic painting. Same thing here – world conquest turns out to be a family spat, and it’s weird and stupid.
  6. Sienna Miller is way too trashy to be somebody called “The Baroness”.
  7. For that matter, The Baroness should really have an accent. For men of my generation, Baroness single-handedly installed a fetish for slinky, bespectacled brunettes with indeterminate foreign accents. Seriously, I would bet that Baroness is actually a more popular geek fantasy than Slave Girl Princess Leia.
  8. Why does “The Doctor” wear a wig? The bottom of his face is covered by a breathing apparatus that keeps him alive, what’s visible of the rest is scarred and burned. Suddenly he’s sensitive about being bald?
  9. Also, at the end, The Doctor becomes Cobra Commander. Why does his fake name have a fake name?
  10. Can’t the enemy soldiers just be enemy soldiers without having to be mind-controlled nanobombs? Like, it shouldn’t be that hard to find bad guys, you know?
THING I LIKED: There is an awesome flashback fight between Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow as ten-year-olds. This fight is actually so much cooler than their grown-up battles.
  1. Ripcord steals an enemy plane, and Scarlett manages to, in quick succession make the twin deductive leaps that a) the weapons are voice controlled (remember, Scarlett is not in the plane and has never seen the control panel), and b) they only respond to commands given in Celtic. I did not make this up.
  2. Did you know that physics underwater are exactly the same as the physics of outer space?
  3. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like the “Blow up Washington DC” plan is kind of at odds with the concurrent “Replace the President with Zartan” plan. One or the other, guys. Otherwise, you’re really just putting a lot of effort into blowing up Zartan.
  4. Speaking of that, Zartan sneaks into the President’s bunker to replace (and presumably kill) him. He and his accomplice kill a couple of other people in the bunker, too. Didn’t people wonder about all the bodies when the State of Emergency was over and they opened the doors? And even if they somehow hid the bodies, don’t people keep track of who’s stationed inside the President’s Panic Room? Wouldn’t somebody be suspicious when none of those people are ever seen again?
  5. General Hawk (Dennis Quaid) gets stabbed by a ninja early on. In the space of about a day, he goes from a sucking chest wound to needing a wheelchair to needing a cane to getting around on his own just fine, thank you very much.
  6. Part of Duke’s training involves fighting using pugil sticks. You know, in case the American Gladiators ever need to be put in their place.
  7. So, Snake Eyes is pretty much the best character in the franchise. In the movie, he doesn’t really get to do anything cool, and it turns out that he’s not mute because his face and vocal cords were destroyed in a battle. Nope, he took a vow of silence as a child. So now he just seems like a wank.
  8. With literally hundreds of characters to choose from, Marlon Wayans plays a pilot named Ripcord. Ripcord was a Caucasian paratrooper. This is sort of a nerdy complaint, but it seemed weird. Like, why would you even call a pilot “Ripcord”?
  9. They spend literally the entire movie setting up Destro’s metal mask. (Seriously, the first scene of the movie is set in 1641, and it’s the origin of the mask.) Not only does Destro never actually put on the mask, but at the end, Cobra Commander injects him with something that turns his face into metal. Even better, he has two reactions. First, quiet acceptance, then horror. It’s like they couldn’t choose which take to use, and then decided to use both but put them in the wrong order.
  10. Snake Eyes disables an underwater cannon by throwing a dude into the mechanism. Somehow, the tech guys manage to get it back online remotely, possibly by pushing the “dislodge dead guy” button.
  11. Some scenes appear to be set in The Matrix. I can’t think of any other explanation why Scarlett has a 40-foot vertical at one point.
  12. And let us not forget Stephen Sommer’s basic approach to special effects – “Close enough, let’s move on!” There’s at least one scene with such obvious bluescreen that it makes the “tiny Ash” scene from Army of Darkness look like Iron Man.
So, that’s pretty much it. I feel like I could think of more if I took more time, but I’ve already spent longer on this that they spent on the script. To recap, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra does not actually contain Cobra, much less any rising. I hate when post-colon subtitles deceive me.
On the bright side, I can confidently report that Funny or Die has something that’s approximately 100 times better than the movie – it’s “The Ballad of GI Joe” by Henry Rollins. And just check out the cast – there’s more star power in this clip than in the actual movie. If Olivia Wilde had played the Baroness, I’d probably still be at the theater.

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