I won’t go into too much. Suffice it to say the following.
Snake Eyes, who does not speak, has more charisma than everyone else put together.
The main villain has a source of mind control nanites. The only way he can think of to take over the world is a rather complicated terrorism scheme. And he’s an arms dealer who manipulates events to create threats and then the weapons to deal with them… who complains about there being too much chaos.
They do have Cobra COmmander. In the comic, he was a dangerous manipulator. In the cartoon, he was a hilarious over-the-top villain. Here, they’ve made him into a petty jackass with a moronic backstory that made my jaw drop. ANd he’s a crappy copy of Darth Vader.
Come to think of it, they have ripped off most of the movie from other, better movies. Most notably Star Wars.
To explain to anyone else: toward the end, the jerkass Cobra Commander wants to kill everyone in the secret submarine base. So he has explosives blow up the ice floating in the sea on top of it. Somehow tihs was supposed to make the ice fall down and crush the base.
Most of the Joes are not so much annoying as completely lacking personalities. I didn’t even really catch their names. Scarlet does jack-all in the movie, the rest of them I really didn’t bother remembering names for. They don’t do much except yell plot exposition loudly.
I liked it. The pacing was relentless and the action was all-out. The acting wasn’t particularly strong, but I had a great time watching it, and that’s really all I was expecting from it. A- in my book (graded on a curve).
Critics are absolutely lambasting this flick, which means I’ll probably take my sons to go see it and we’ll eat a lot of popcorn and leave the theatre just as dazed by the sunlight as we are when we see any other movie.
The villain’s motivations made a liiiitttllleee more sense in the movie than they did in the cartoon, which was essentially “Cobra appeared out of nowhere and wants to cause chaos and destroy the whole world because…uh…it just does.” I liked Stormshadow (just getting to look at him for 2 1/2 hours was worth price of admission.) and SnakeEyes, and I actually appreciated the Baroness. She had much more charisma and character than most female villains.
GET OUT OF THE ELEVATOR!!!..nice shoes., little moments like that with her made her more than just the ‘femme fetale’ stereotype.
Scarlett was lame. Too many ‘war movie’ cliches. WALK AWAY DUKE!!! There’s nothing YOU CAN DO!!! You have to COME WITH ME!!! And it would be great if they could re-cast Duke with someone who can, y’know, act. But I liked Joseph Gordon Levitt’s doctor character and the whole Rex=Doctor=Cobra Commander thing actually surprised me a little. But that could very well have been me staring too hard at Stormshadow and not paying attention to obvious things.
But overall, it was neat to watch, and I had a lot of fun. It wasn’t ‘good’, but I enjoyed myself, and I’ll catch the sequels.
I did have some problem swallowing the whole ‘The Baroness was only a big meanie because she had the little robots’ inside her plotpoint. It was more interesting to me when I thought the death of her brother convinced her she had nothing to live for and she had turned her rage out onto the whole world. The minute she stated in the flashback that her brother was the only family she had left, I thought, ‘oh he’s toast’.
I saw it with my son, only because I had promised to take him. The CGI effects were pretty horrible…and pretty obvious on a “The Last Starfighter” level of obvious.
The thing that baked my mind though was, if the nanites can heal and reshape flesh, WHY in the Nine Hells didn’t Rex use them to heal himself?
Just saw it yesterday. I rank it worse than Transformers 2, so yah…
There are too many things that don’t make sense and are mind-boggling. You have made the war-heads, but you need a trip to Paris to activate it? A youngster, no more than 12 years old, going to kill a thief? (He must have a dark and violent past). Not to mention that the same young thief could perform back flips?
I really dislike the idea of the power-suits and what they did with it. They turn the whole action sequence into a laughing sequence. And how anyone could get away with building a military base under Antarctica without causing serve environmental changes that would catch the attention of scientists is beyond my imagination.
The acting is bad. Only SnakeEyes, the Baroness does not grate me. Everyone else is just ‘meh’. Duke is the worst.
[url=http://blogs.amctv.com/future-of-classic/2009/08/g-i-joe-or-team-america-world-police.php]Fun article arguing that GIJ is simply a remake of another recent classic.
I disagree. I firmly believe that the entire cast should be up for nominations for the “Best Actor” category.
After all, they were able to say such lines as, “Yo Joe!” with a straight face. If that’s not a true test of a thespian’s ability, I don’t know what is.
The NYT movies reviews often have give a sarcastic or humorous reason for the rating- e.g., " ‘Paper Heart’ is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Adult language and infantile behavior" or " ‘Cold Souls’ is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Be warned: the film encourages thinking". For G.I. Joe, they really turn up the snark:
Look Sienna Miller was hot. And damn those glasses were sexy. Lots of things going boom, a matrix type carchase, Empire Strikes Back type reveal, all of it corny as hell. What more could you want?
Quality and intelligence. Thsoe things are all good, but the core of the movie is soulless and shallow and just plain dumb. The movie is not nearly funny or pretty enough to get away with it. Having those does not require the film to be tedious and vapid.
