Yo Joe? Dear God No: Pound Shop Flix and ‘GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra’

That’s right readers, this week it’s the turn of that 80’s cartoon/ toy franchise that never really made it in the U.K, but nonetheless made it to Hollywood 20-ish years later. GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra is a live-action version of the franchise in a similar mold to that of the Michael Bay Transformers movies, released hot on the heels of Transformers 2 in 2009.

I mentioned in the sneak peek that I have an affection for the franchise. So in the interest of full disclosure (and as an excuse to talk about it) I feel I should let you in on my feelings.* G.I. Joe- despite being a cynical attempt to pry money from the hands of parents ad their toy-buyin’ cartoon watchin’ kids crossed with a weird U.S paramilitary theme- is great. The toys and their nicknames like ‘Quick-Kick’, ‘Lowlight’ and ‘Snow Job’ (not a joke) were a huge success, the comics were (and somehow continue to be) better than they had any right to be, giving readers a kind of long-form military soap opera with larger than life characters and genuine excitement. GI Joe ries above it’s cash-grabbing origins to actually present the world with largely good cartoons, toys and comics. Though I’ve only recently got into old school Transformers, GI Joe has been an enthusiasm of mine for going on 5 or 6 years. So to conclude this little segue, I likely come to this live action adaptation with a little more franchise knowledge than the average U.K cinema-goer, but also with more specific desires of what I wanted from it.

Spoilers ho!

So in truth my expectations with this film were pretty tempered. I knew it wasn’t going to be the film I wanted it to be, and my intial research on other write-ups of the film had suggested that it wasn’t really very good even taken purely on its own merits. I’ll start with a quick summary of the plot and then talk about what I think worked, and what didn’t .So GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra (‘GIJTROF’ hence) follows ‘Duke’ (Channing Tatum) and his buddy ‘Ripcord’ (Marlon Wayans) as special forces soldiers who quickly find themselves wrapped up in a tussle between multi-national paramilitary strike force G.I Joe and the nefarious arms dealer James McCullen (Christopher Ecclestone). Joining GI Joe after a training montage, the pair then work with their fellow ‘Joes’ Scarlett (Rachel Nichols), Heavy Duty (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), Breaker (Saïd Taghmaoui) and Snake Eyes (Ray Park) to try and stop the arms dealer releasing nano-bot warheads on the world. Along the way they realise that one of McCullen’s co-conspirators is Duke’s ex fiance Ana (Sienna Miller), now known by the far more villainous ‘The Baroness’. Essentially the plot plays out through a number of extended actions scenes: fights, chases in a variety of vehicles, and shootouts. Eventually the immediate plan is thwarted by the destruction of the warheads and the reawakening of the love between Duke and Ana; but a new threat to world peace/ sequel set-up seems to loom.

The film then relies heavily on action sequences to provide the excitement of the film. This is just as well as they are easily its greatest strength. It all looks pretty good and is shot pretty sleekly. There is even some flair and invention in the fight scenes, with Heavy Duty’s use of grenades a particular highlight.

Indeed my only real complaint about the action is that their was sometimes TOO much going on. But you know who the goodies and baddies are, so the broad strokes are easy to follow. Additionally, they clearly spent a lot of money on this film because the cgi is ever present and by-and-large pretty damn good. There are nano-bots, space-ship looking aircraft, ‘Iron Man’ style combat suits and a magic homing crossbow (it’s not magic but it might as well be).

While the humour is not all excellent, genuine moments of levity are provided thanks to class clown Marlon Wayans, who (and I can’t believe I’m saying this) actually puts in one of the better performances here. The film has another ace in Christopher Ecclestone, an appropriately bond-villain esque arms dealer with a sort of Sean Connery inflection. The character’s only really let down by the scripting, the writers seemingly believing that an international, 21st Century arms dealer would riddle his musings with faux-quaint Scottish/ British idioms such as: ‘Ahhh, my lady of the lake’. Then there is Saïd Taghmaou, who as Breaker puts in the films best performanes. He’s the only one who seems to realise his character can have colour and, well, character without hamming it up like a hog at an orgy…

And that brings us to my criticisms. I like Channing Tatum, he’s a good actor these days, especially when allowed to show his funny side. However, he is Not Very Good in this film, mistaking maintaining an accent and mumbling his lines for character work. This isn’t helped by a script that makes him bland white protagonist #6578, but yeah his performance doesn’t work for me here. That said it’s not so bad as to derail things; just not good enough to lift them.

Expanding a little on the above, a lot of the dialogue and writing in this film is pretty crap. Some of it is just lifeless, and some of it is really awful. The plot is basically fine- they weren’t aiming for Shakespeare here- but none of the characters are believeable, and some of the dialogue is cringe-worthy. The worst I can recall of the top of my head is some of the lines they feed Scarlett in the first half of the film, a woman who -get this- reads books: ‘Love is not quantifiable and therefore does not exist’. ‘My father trained me to always win’. I’m paraphrasing with these quotes but the actual lines are pretty close. They seem to have wanted to create a smart, well-read soldier in Scarlett, but have written her like a robotic Dr Spock; like they’ve never actually met a person who was smart. Fortunately this stuff is forgotten when the action starts and Scarlett is basically just another soldier. I feel like I moan about the writing in these flix every week, maybe its something films think they can scrimp on? Or maybe film-making has reached a point where studios have the money to make basically anything LOOK good, but not actually BE good. Anyway…

The real issue with this films is one of tone. Firstly its charmless. Apart from a couple of decent jokes from Ripcord, all the characters sound like they’re trying to be witty and failing, but more than this there’s no real sense of fun. When you have characters like Snake Eyes: The Caucasian Ninja Who Never Speaks you either have to go for a mostly serious tone and absolutely nail it, or lean into the camp side of it. This film goes largely for the former ad doesn’t really succeed. Moreover I’m not sure whether they wanted to make this a kid’s film, as the dumb dialogue and heavily signposted character decisions suggest, or one for an older crowd, as the surprising violence**,6 or 7 curses or Sienna Miller’s not-infrequently-present cleavage*** seem to suggest. I don’t think the filmmakers really knew either.

Overall then this film wasn’t terrible. More or less on par with Salt in terms of watchability. But as a franchise GI Joe is capable of rising above it’s cash-grabbing origins; this film sadly does not reach those heights.

2 stars!: **

Best Performance: Saïd Taghmaoui

Worst Offence: Scarlett’s early characterisation

Elevator Pitch: ‘Hey remember GI Joes, they were great right? Well what if we took away the fun stuff and added Boobs and Swearing? Y’now, for the kids!’

Until next time readers,

-Tom

*My therapist will be proud!

**For example: there’s 2 or 3 fights between Snake Eyes and evil ninja Storm Shadow (Byung-Hun Lee) as children via flashback (they were trained by the same master, it’s a whole Thing) where these two child actors look like they’re properly kicking the crap out of each other

***As you see on the poster at the start of this post, one of the taglines of this film was genuinely ‘Evil Never Looked So Good’- simply because The Baroness was present.