G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
I know I'm going to be in the minority with G.I. Joe. Heck, the reviews over on Rotten Tomatoes are already confirming that. But, I strive to report my honest reaction to every movie I see, and the honest truth is, this movie left me with a big, dopey smile on my face. Maybe I was in the right mood for a lot of outlandish silliness. Or maybe this movie managed to reach my inner 10-year-old that Michael Bay's Transformers and its sequel could not.
Heading home, I was trying to figure out what this movie did to work for me that Transformers was lacking. After all, they share a lot of similarities. They're both filled with wall-to-wall action, special effects, and noise, the characters spout dialogue that would make me cringe if it wasn't so intentionally goofy, and neither film has a plot that make a lick of sense. I know all this, but I walked out happy with this movie. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that director Stephen Sommers (Van Helsing) gets the vibe right. There's a joy here that's lacking from Michael Bay's mechanical heroes. It also gave me everything I wanted from a G.I. Joe movie, and nothing I didn't. There are no needless comic relief characters that have nothing to do with anything (like the parents in Transformers), and the movie doesn't waste any time with pointless exposition. Sure, the plot suffers because of this, but this was one of the rare times where I didn't care. When I heard the Accelerator Suits the Joes use in battle described (it generally allows them to move at inhuman speeds), I smiled. When I actually saw the Suits in action, I not only smiled, I was genuinely excited. And when I saw the evil Cobra organization's secret base (which, in the tradition of best evil secret bases, is located underwater and has its missiles aimed at the White House), it was like watching the pretend war games I used to play with my friends come to life.
That's the real secret. The movie felt right to me. The tone is completely right, balancing frantic action with one-liners flying left and right, but never becoming so dominant that I wished the characters would stop talking for a while. The characters look right, too. When we're introduced to two of the main Joe members, the flame-haired Scarlet (Rachel Nichols) and silent ninja Snake Eyes (Ray Park), I smiled out of recognition. It was nice to see that the characters actually looked somewhat the way I remembered them, and not giant, walking whirling piles of CG junk like Optimus Prime and the gang. And yet, this is not the only way that the movie worked for me. Not only does it touch upon nostalgia, but it also creates some truly fun action sequences. I liked the sequence set in Paris, with the Joes racing to stop the terrorists from setting off a nanomachine weapon aimed at the Eiffel Tower. I also liked that the movie actually gave us a good look at the action. So many movies are edited so fast, we barely get to see what we're supposed to be looking at. Here, we get to see everything. We get a lot of well done public destruction, and a surprisingly large body count. One warning to parents about G.I. Joe - The movie is pretty violent. No blood is actually depicted, for the sake of the PG-13 rating.
The movie doesn't seem to care much about the plot, so I won't spend much time recapping it. The G.I. Joe team are a group of highly skilled military warriors, who have names like Duke (Channing Tatum), Hawk (Dennis Quaid), and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans, who is surprisingly more reigned in than usual here). Their job is to protect the world from the plans of a mysterious supervillain (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a long way from 500 Days of Summer here) who has teamed up with an arms dealer named McCullen (Christopher Eccleston) to create a secret terrorist army that will take over the world. Why, you ask? What else would an army with an underwater base and guns powerful enough to literally melt the Eiffel Tower to nothing do? Also on the side of the evil Cobra army is the Baroness (Sienna Miller), who used to be Duke's girlfriend in the past, but now is working for the bad guys, and looks like she bought out the world's supply of black leather body suits. I almost forgot Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee), an evil ninja who used to train with the Joe's ninja, Snake Eyes, until he murdered their master, which we witness in a flashback. There's a lot of flashbacks in this movie, because everyone seems to be connected with everyone else. I love the way the movie handles the flashbacks. Someone will say something which triggers a memory, and the character will get this faraway look in their eyes as they look off into the distance, almost as if they're mentally preparing themselves for the flashback that's about to start. It's cheesy, but hey, so is G.I. Joe.
If you ask me to explain the plot, I'll shake my head. It's a futile effort, and the movie knows it. So, why am I recommending it? Doesn't fun count for anything anymore? I was able to look around the film's numerous problems. Something I couldn't do with a lot of big, dumb summer movies that attempted the same thing. The action I missed in Wolverine, the sense of joy I missed in Terminator Salvation (even though I didn't mind as much as most people seemed to, it was a little too grim to be labeled as a "joyful" summer movie), I found it here in spades. Sometimes my brain hungers for cinematic junk food, and at least this is well done junk food. I guess the real question, since the movie's sole purpose is to kick start a new franchise, is does this make me want to see more? All I can say is, I want to know what happened to the President of the United States, and how did he know the man who approached him the last time we see him?
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