That film, is G.I. Joe: Retaliation.
Why does this film feel like it was made on a fraction of the first one's budget? What did they spend the cash on? Oh...
Disclaimer: I am not a childhood Joe fan, I was born too late for that, grew up in the UK and was into Transformers, Dinosaurs and Lassie (yes really, it was my first word) during my formative years. As a result, the bashing I am about to give this film is entirely down to it being a god damn travesty of a motion picture, not some silly fanboy whinging (which I am sometimes prone to). Also, I don't know if the dumb crap I'm getting mad at is terrible writing or some excellently placed true to comic reference, I know I'm a hypocrite but I'm not going to read a load of Joe comics just to help digest this film, I've just got to call it as I see it.
Lastly, I'm not a professional critic/reviewer, so don't expect structure, deconstruction or expert analysis, just me getting angry at films.
Right, lets get started. 2009's G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was not a perfect film, I wouldn't even say it was a good film, but it was decent, it had a weird campy charm about it that reminded me of watching certain Bond films (specifically Moonraker and The Spy Who Loved Me) and did a good job of essentially being a Saturday morning cartoon blown up into a $170 million movie (for better and for worse). The characters were broad strokes, but likable/memorable enough and I for one cared what happened to them.
So what did happen to them? Well, for the most part they all disappeared. Sienna Miller? Gone. Joseph Gordon-Levitt? Gone. Christopher Ecclestone? Gone.
So the film starts with Channing Tatum (he's still here), The Rock (we'll go into this in more detail later) and Adrianne Palicki (doing a really terrible job of trying to break the "I used to be in Friday Night Lights" film curse) as well as some other army guys (supposedly the Joe's; Heavy Duty, Scarlett, Ripcord and Breaker are, you guessed it! Gone!) break into a North Korean army base and rescue a defector from captivity. During this scene, Tatum drops a ton of terrible exposition on us telling us that following the "Nanobot War" (no time frame specified) he now leads the Joe's (who have gone from pretty much a private army with their own underground city base to about 30 guys with some fancy helicopters) and gives some brief info on the 3 or 4 guys likely to have more than 30 seconds of screen time: Duke (Tatum), Roadblock (Rock) Lady Jaye (Palicki) Snake Eyes (Ray "Darth Maul" Park, who doesn't turn up til like halfway through the film for some reason) and Flint (D.J Cotrona, who might as well have not been in the film, he does nothing).
Right, about The Rock, I like him, he was an entertaining wrestler, and he's a capable actor (who actually has an excellent balance between his imposing physical presence and his natural gift for comic delivery) but I really don't think he should ever be anywhere near a project like this. He feels out of place, like dropping Rambo into the middle of Hot Shots, seeing him run around all serious cocking huge guns, moving "military style" like he's crapped himself and straight up murdering everyone in sight just spoils things a bit in my opinion.
So after the opening, and some bonding time between Rock and Tatum (they're best friends, despite the fact we never saw one of them before) the President (who is still the undercover COBRA guy, in a great "follow up to a cliffhanger which X-Men didn't have the balls to do anything with" move) asks the Joe's to grab a nuke from some base somewhere (even this soon in, I was getting pretty fatigued trying to comprehend the plot). The mission goes off flawlessly, right until the end when a mysterious airstrike wipes out most of the Joe's, INCLUDING TATUM! One of the poster guys, gets nailed by an exploding jeep, just like that, for almost no reason, everyone's sad for about 5 minutes and then it's back to ass kicking. Oh, he dies saving Flint, but there's no survivor guilt, character development or anything of substance there. It's like some executive saw Tatum's paychecks coming out every week and thought "Shit, need to put a stop to that" and made some calls to the writers. It's not quite the X-Men 3 Cyclops disappearance, but it's close.
While this is going on, Storm Shadow (the bad ninja, who wears white) breaks Cobra Commander out of the world's most inept prison by posing as Snake Eyes (the good ninja, who wears black) getting detained (in full body armor) then breaking free and grabbing his swords (which were kept like 6 feet away from him for some reason, if I ever have to detain a deadly ninja, I'm going to throw all his weapons into the damn sea before I lock him up). Oh yeah, Commander and Destro were captured at some point, it was mentioned in passing. So Commander breaks free and then randomly decides to just leave Destro, for no reason, abandoning his most trusted henchman, right before he sets off to start a war, marvelous.
The film then just devolves into a mess, Ray Stevenson turns up (as Firefly, an ex Joe working for COBRA, although it's not mentioned at all). The evil fake president claimed that the Joe's went rogue and establishes COBRA as his new private security (despite, you know, Cobra Commander being a well known villain), the guards even wear little COBRA logo broaches on their suits, despite it being the same logo as evil organisation COBRA. Cobra Commander reveals his evil plan, Project Zeus, basically Goldeneye on steriods, then proceeds to do nothing else for the rest of the film, he walks down some stairs, talks for about a minute and then does a runner off camera during the piss poor final battle.
Storm Shadow, burned badly helping Commander escape, has to get healed in the Himalayas for "reasons", has his mandatory ninja fight with Snake Eyes, then gets captured and taken to the Blind Master (RZA! Yay!) who reveals that he was manipulated into joining COBRA by Zartan (the disguise guy, who's now the president) who killed his mentor, the Hard Master (snigger), resulting in his expulsion from ninja school and a massive leap of faith leading him to side with the bad guys for some reason. So Shadow turns good, walks back into the COBRA base (despite having knowingly been captured, no one questions him at all) and waits.
Meanwhile, the Joe's track down the original Joe, played by Bruce Willis, who appears only to drop more exposition, give everyone massive guns and attempt to broaden the film's appeal, and, having learnt the plan from Storm Shadow, mount a full on (4 person) assault on COBRA. Oh, and Bruce is dismissive of Lady Jaye, who despite not having shown an ounce of incompetence all film, is suddenly patronized and described as a disappointment to her military minded parents, because sexism.
So the big fight kicks off, Shadow turns good (after nonchalantly waiting while London gets totally destroyed, err cheers!) and murders the fake president guy (with the sword Snake Eyes gave him, because they're bros now), Commander just books it and disappears, Rock drives a terrible looking tank/car thing through what looks like a car park with some bags of sand dumped in it, then jumps out and kills Ray Stevenson with an exploding fly (really), pausing just long enough to hit the "cancel" button on the doomsday device (which, as well as cancelling the sequence, causes all the satellites to self destruct, also, it looks like it's the same button as the launch command, buggered if you accidentally press that twice!).
There's a medal presentation afterwards, and the real president pops up and says sorry (try convincing the world's media you were being impersonated when the evidence was completely destroyed) and Bruce Willis gives The Rock General Patton's gun so he can use it to kill Cobra Commander (this is entirely as ridiculous as it sounds).
So there it is, apologies if this is impossible to read, if it sounds like a colossal mess, that's because the film really is so disjointed and horrible. If you can't follow it, give the film a watch, or just read the synopsis on Wikipedia, just don't spend any money on it.
Ben
