G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (**½)

Directed by: Stephen Sommers
Starring: Channing Tatum, Adewale Akkinnuoye-Agbaje, Christopher Eccleston, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Byung-hun Lee, Sienna Miller, Rachel Nichols, Ray Park, Jonathan Price, Dennis Quaid, Marlon Wayans, Said Taghmaoui
Seen: August 15th 2009

**½ Out of ****

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (GIJ) is the second Hasbro toy-based movie to be released in as many months, and it is the better one by some length. That is not to say that it is good at all, it is just much better than Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. After the early “brilliance” of Michael Bay on movies such as The Rock, The Bad Boys movies, and The Island, I would not have predicted lauding a movie for not stinking of Michael Bay, but that is exactly what I’m doing with GIJ. It is just pure action and special effects mayhem. In Transformers you couldn’t always truly figure out what was going on on-screen, here you can. The action sequences are loud and proud of it, things explode where they shouldn’t, things are blown to bits without the slightest thought of collateral damage, and worlds are created on a grandiose scale, if with childlike imagination.

The movie opens with a scene in 1641, and this is executed so pathetically that anything that follows can only get better. James McCullen, a Scotsman caught for selling arms to both sides in feudal Britain. The forces then continue to put a red-hot metal mask on his face as he spouts the kind of stuff you’d expect from a delusional terrorist in today’s time, not 368 years ago!

Back to the near future, where GIJ plays out, James McCullen (Eccleston) is, like his ancestor, an arms dealer, his credo: Don’t get caught selling to both sides. He has just developed a new nanotechnology based weapon of mass destruction capable of destroying entire cities, and the military is now moving it to a hidden location. Big surprise, en route they are ambushed by The Baroness (Miller), and the only two survivors on the army convoy are Conrad Hauser, or Duke (Tatum) and Wallace Weems, or Ripcord (Wayans) after being “rescued” by a G. I. Joe team, consisting of Scarlet (Nichols), Heavy Duty (Akkinnuoye-Agbaje) and Breaker (Taghmaoui). They are taken to G. I. Joe headquarters, which exists only in the dreams of those interested in/obsessed by field ops and gadgets.

The bad guys boast their own cool base far under the ocean, and their Doctor, or mad scientist (Gordon Levitt) is menacing in his planning and eventual coup in their ranks. He is however a bit over the top, as I couldn’t help but, for a moment, think of Darth Vader when I saw him taking off his mask. The weapons utilised by the bad guys at times make it hard to believe that the Joe’s can defeat them, as the destructive power of the sonic-blast guns is quite impressive.

The movie is essentially a bunch of big and flashy action sequences patched together with small bits of “acting” so don’t be surprised if the movie receives no acting or screenplay awards. GIJ is my number two Stephen Sommers movie, with only The Mummy (1999) outshining this effort. Eye-candy aplenty abounds in this film for fans of the cartoons, and the action scenes are filmed in such a way that the do not bring on occasional nausea – while you still feel part of the action, Sommers wisely decided to not use the ever popular shaky-cam so overused nowadays.

GIJ is a fun movie that can be enjoyed by young blokes and their dads, and anyone who likes a bit of shiny action. Just don’t expect too much more.