It should be noted before I begin this review that I am trying my absolute hardest here to be as unbiased as possible in my review of this film. Growing up, GI Joe was hands down my favorite line of toys. Everything else was secondary to the Joe team, and I knew going into this that pretty much no live-action Joe film ever made could ever possibly live up to the one I've been dreaming up in my brain since the age of 7 or so. I understand that and have accepted it. So when I start bagging on this film in a few paragraphs, I don't want you to think I'm doing so because I'm an angry fanboy who's pissed off that his favorite childhood toys got turned into a shitty film. While I admit to being an angry fanboy, I want to stress that I am doing my best to judge this film simply on its merits, and not by the longstanding association I have with the GI Joe franchise.
Oh, also, consider this your SPOILER WARNING! While I typically abhor giving spoilers in a movie review, there are some plot points that happen in this film that I must discuss to explain just why I think the way I do about this film. Consider yourselves warned.
Ok, with that said, here we go . . .
Oh my god this film sucked so badly in so many ways, but it's probably not for the reasons that you're thinking. Was the film over-the-top and silly and cheesy, yes it was most definitely all of those . . . but so was the GI Joe cartoon series. Let's not forget this film is based on an 80's kids cartoon series. The original show was basically a vehicle to sell toys to kids, and it did its job well. While I and many people my age have very fond memories of watching Snake Eyes and the rest of the Joe team beating up Cobra every week, let's not forget just how horrible and goofy that show could be. This was the same series where GI Joe and Cobra got involved in a hockey match for parts of a Weather Dominator that had fallen to earth after having been blown up. The same series that once had Snake Eyes appear in a chorus line and then breakdance. And let's not forget the episode where the evil Cobra plot was to take over the world using subliminal messages hidden in the music of a horrible 80's pop metal band called Cold Slither.
My point being, the show was goofy, so I have no problem with the film being goofy too. GI Joe still is, afterall, a tool to sell toys. If this wasn't apparent enough beforehand, the fact that the person at the theater's ticket booth gave me both a ticket and a catalog of all of the available GI Joe movie toys at Target when I gave her my money brought this point painfully home. This film wasn't being made for me. It wasn't even being made for anyone over the age of 12. This was made for kids, and it should be viewed as such. Therefore, the fact that the film featured action scenes taht could only be described as cartoonish is fine by me. Yes, a woman can jump off of a motorcycle seconds before it collides head on with another vehicle, fly 40 feet into the air, be caught by a guy running at least 100mph himself, and be perfectly fine. Yes, a Hummer with a big metal shovel on the front of it can send any car it hits spinning 100 feet into the air before they explode. Yes, entire teams of people can shoot full clips of automatic weapons at someone only 20 feet away and still somehow manage to miss them. Yes, people can be killed left and right with ninja swords but a drop of blood is never seen. I'm fine with all that.
My problems with this film stem more from a technical level. This film had a budget of around $150 million, right? Then why is a lot of the CG so atrocious? Why does the makeup for the main villains look like something I'd see from a high school theater production? What blind and mentally deficient designer created most of the costumes for this film? Why are there so many huge, but easily fixable plotholes? I don't care if it is a kids film that's just been made to sell toys. Just because it's a kids film is no excuse for bad plot. Kids films can have good plots too.
At it's basic, I'm ok with the story of the GI Joe movie. Cobra has developed these cool missle warheads that have a green goo in them which can expand out and eat anything made of metal. They're planning on using these missles to blow up cities around the world and either have the world cower in fear of them or pay them a ransom or something, I'm not quite sure since it was never really made clear. That doesn't matter though because at least the basic plot is exactly like something out of the GI Joe TV series. Cobra, or at least Destro in this film, has a cool scary device to blow stuff up, and the Joes have to stop them. It feels like GI Joe, and that's good. What doesn't make sense though is the details. These missle warheads were built by Destro, for NATO. Destro's built these things, he owns the factory that makes them. So why then does he spend the first half of the film trying to steal the warheads back from the US Government and the GI Joe team?
At the beginning of the film he sells the warheads to them. Why didn't he just keep them? Or, if he wants to sell them to fund his operations, why not use his completely legal and government sanctioned weapons factory to build more of them for himself? The film's excuse for this is that Destro doesn't want NATO to know that he is the bad guy who uses the weapons, but if this is the case, why the hell is Destro personally handling the retrieval process and making it abundantly clear to everyone involved that he's stealing his own weapons back so he can use them to blow up cities? You'd think this would be where Cobra Commander comes in, right? If Destro doesn't want to look like a bad guy, why not have an evil terrorist organization run by a different guy show up and steal the stuff, thus leaving Destro blame free? But no, it turns out that Cobra Commander is Destro's techie/bitch boy who makes all of his equipment for him, and he instead sends a team of guys decked out head to toe in Destro's company's gear to get the warheads back. Good one Destro! Now NATO will never know that you had anything to do with it.
I could go on and on about such gaping plot holes, as the film has many, but for fear of this review reaching the length of one of the latter Harry Potter novels, I'll save us time and only point out one more that really bugged me. Snake Eyes is pretty much everyone's favorite member of the Joe team, right? He's a kickass ninja who dresses all in black and never speaks, and it's well a well known fact in the Joe Mythology that Snake Eyes' arch rival is Stormshadow, a kickass ninja from his same clan who wears all white and who speaks a lot (typically mocking or taunting Snake Eyes). It a classic rivalry that fans have loved for years, so it's no wonder that it was included in the film. We learn of this rivalry through two different flashbacks in the film. In the first flashback, we see Snake Eyes and Stormshadow meet for the first time as kids. Snake Eyes is a homeless kid (I'd say between 8 to 10 years old) on the streets of Japan who breaks into a monastary to get some food. The little kid version of Stormshadow walks in on him, catching him in the act, and a fight breaks out.
The fight itself is pretty decent (for a kid fight) and I even get over my inherent hatred for child actors because I figure it's just the one scene and the fight was fun to watch. Their fight is broken up by the school's master and Snake Eyes is invited to join them since he fights so well. Ok, simple enough, right? It's introduced the characters' back story and set up the rivalry well enough. So you'd imagine that the next flashback or two would show them growing up together and becoming close (they refer to each other as "brother" a lot). You'd then see them grow apart as Stormshadow's inherent evilness and jealousy of Snake Eyes takes over and he eventually kills their master. That would make sense, wouldn't it?
Well so much for making sense. Instead, this film treats us to only one more cutscene in which we see the same two kids from the first scene (who hadn't aged a day) training together for a few matches before kid Snake Eyes beats kid Stormshadow once. Kid Stormshadow gets all pissed off that his master likes this, and so he stabs the guy in the back (literally) and runs away. Done this way, the background of these two pivotal characters loses anything that could have made it good. After seeing the second flashback the audience is left to believe that Snake Eyes and Stormshadow only trained together for maybe a few weeks or months at most before Stormshadow killed their master. That meant they didn't have enough time together to grow a close enough bond to call each other "brother". It means that Snake Eyes only got a few months at most of actual Ninja training and thus can't possibly be a ninja master, and it also means that Stormshadow can't be a ninja master either since he killed his master at such a young age.
The story, as shown, leaves us with too many unanswered questions. Why are Snake Eyes and Stormshadow so close when they only barely knew each other? Where did they learn their ninja skills from after their master died? Have they even seen each other since that day? Why the hell would Snake Eyes take a lifelong vow of silence over the death of a master he only knew for a few weeks? And just how in god's name did a little 10 year old Stormshadow kill a ninja master? All of these questions could have been avoided if the second flashback had featured 20 year old actors instead of kids. It's this sort of simple oversight that is indicative of a lot of the GI Joe movie's problems. There are so many things that come across as flat out stupid that could have been made cool with one or two simple changes to the story.
Is the film all bad though? I'd have to say no. Aside from it's many, many problems, there are some cool things to see in the GI Joe film. As I said before the basic plot is like a classic GI Joe story. A lot of the actions scenes are actually fairly enjoyable too. Halfway through the film there's an attack on the GI Joe base which is pretty fun to watch. There's a sweet underwater battle near the end that is different from anything I've ever seen before, and a lot of the vehicles and gadgets in the film looked like something straight out of the GI Joe toyline too. I thought that was pretty rad.
Also, even though the story completely fraks up the character of the Baronness beyond belief, seeing Sienna Miller walking across the screen with her black hair, glasses and skintight black outfit was pure joy. Yeah, she didn't have an accent (which is so incredibly wrong), but at least she looked the part. Scarlett also was amazing eye candy, even though her character could have and should have been a hell of a lot tougher.
Aside from the bad backstory, and aside from the god awful molded plastic lips on his face, they actually brought across the character of Snake Eyes rather well. When he got into combat and was doing sweet ninja moves it really was like getting to see my childhood fantasy battles with him made real. Adult Stormshadow was also handled really well, and I loved the actor playing him. Whenever he and Snake Eyes met in the film, I got all giddy.
On a completely random note, Brenden Frasier has a small cameo in the film. I don't know why, but that thoroughly amused me.
Overall though, the GI Joe movie is pretty damned terrible. The plot is so bad I'm convinced a team of retarded monkeys on acid could have written something more intelligent, the acting is straight up cheeseball, the special effects and makeup looked really bad, and whoever designed Cobra Commander's helmet needs to be shot in the face. Seriously, he spends the vast majority of the film walking around as a guy called The Doctor and looking like a reject from a low budget direct-to-TV film from the SyFy channel, only to finally put on his full helmet at the very end to announce himself as Cobra Commander, which somehow only serves in making him look worse. I'm not kidding. This is what he looks like.
Do you hear that sound? That's the sound of thousands of talented costume designers killing themselves because some hack got this approved while they're still trying to find work.
In the end, I'd say this film is just about as bad as Transformers 2 was. Actually, wait, I take that back. This was slightly better than Transformers 2 was, but that's only because this film didn't have any horribly racist black stereotype characters running around in it like that one did. Other than that though, they're basically the same. It's mind numbingly stupid (in a bad way) and if you were in any way a fan of the franchise as a kid, seeing this will make you want to rip out your eyeballs and throw them far, far away just so the pain of having to endure viewing it will stop.
Final Grade: D
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