GI Joe: Retaliation review

    Oh God, this movie is terrible.

    It's fun but it's terrible.

    There are so many weird and inexplicable decisions throughout this film. The cast is fine, better than fine, I'd argue, but what they're working for is a trainwreck. I was somewhat hard on GI JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA but I felt that it was a movie with a lot of potential. It certainly set up the sequel pretty well with the character relationships and world-building off to a good start. Unfortunately, the sequel throws all of this out the window and the result is a mess that none of the cast can save.

    Part of this wasn't the fault of the writers, directors, or producers. Virtually, the entirety of the cast from The Rise of Cobra didn't elect to return to the sequel. Channing Tatum would only return if they killed off his character, Duke, who was the star of the previous movie. Christopher Eccelston said filming the first movie was like having his throat cut.

    Sienna Miller, one of the most popular parts of the film for multiple reasons (including fanservice), also felt she was a horrible fit for the Baroness. Not even Gordon Joseph Levitt returned as Cobra Commander because he was filming Inception. Given so much of the previous movie was setting up the complicated dynamics between all four of these characters, it effectively meant you'd need a total recast or to throw out nearly everything. They chose the latter. Honestly, it probably would have been better to do a total reboot if they hadn't done a recast because the plot barely makes any sense and when it does tie-in, it makes you upset about what's done. 

    The premise is that GI Joe has gone from being an international team of heroes to an American group of special forces doing missions in places like North Korea as well as Afghanistan. Duke (Channing Tatum) is now the leader but his second-in-command is Roadblock (The Rock), which already raises questions because Dwayne Johnson is about eight years older than Channing Tatum so why is he his subordinate? 

    The President of the United States has been replaced by Zartan (Arnold Vosloo) but, sadly, it's Jonathan Pryce on screen for the most part. Which is fine but he's not exactly projecting menace and I'd prefer Arnold. With Zartan's help, Storm Shadow (Lee Byung-hun) rescues Cobra Commander (Luke Bracey, Robert Bakker) and frames the Joes for terrorism, so they're wiped out by a group of Cobra soldiers pretending to be a new group of American soldiers. The Joes go out to clear their names and, well, screw up.

    The thing is, this is actually a fairly decent premise. Adrianne Palicki is also a great recast for Scarlet and...oh, she's playing Lady Jaye. Just playing her exactly like Scarlet. Okay then. We also have Jinx (Daredevil's Elodie Yung) introduced and the Blind Master (played by RZA), which odd choice in casting aside, sets up a nice ninja arc where Snake Eyes (Ray Park) goes after Storm Shadow to continue their eternal blood feud. If the movie had kept to this premise then it would have been a pretty serviceable flick.

    I'd miss Destro and the Baroness but it would have been a good story salvaged from bad circumstances.
It's not a spoiler since it's in the trailer but there's an utterly insane and stupid plot about nuclear weapons where Cobra ends up getting rid of all of them before destroying London. Yes, London. The Joes fail to save one of the world's most populous cities and ten million people die. That's not exactly a great premise for future movies in the franchise nor does it really reflect well on our heroes who utterly fail to save the day. There's some good scenes but our heroes kind of get their efforts dwarfed by this.

    Yeah, this movie sadly killed the GI Joe franchise for awhile when it could have been every bit as successful as the Transformers one if not more so. It's not hard to do GI Joe as you can do it either like Call of Duty or something much-much sillier. The Fast and the Furious movies basically became the GI Joe movies at one point. Do that. The franchise has since been rebooted with Snake Eyes: Origins but it's been left on the table since. Which is a shame.

4/10

GI Joe: Classified by Kelley Skovron review

    I wouldn’t normally think of GI Joe as science fiction even if I would normally be quite happy to put it under Young Adult. It is, now that I think about it, a children’s series. I know, right? Crazy. I mean, I’m forty-three years old and I watched it as a child. How strange it hasn’t been consistently updated to keep up with my changing tastes and maturity level like all other media has been.

    Well, unless you count SPHINX from Venture Brothers. Still, I stumbled upon this book quite by accident and wondered what a Young Adult GI Joe book released in 2020 would be about. The very short version would be that it’s basically GI Joe’s version of X-men: Evolution. X-men: Evolution is also 23 years old itself. Wow, I need to get to work on stopping this aging thing. Maybe if I got myself some mutagen. Ninja Turtles are still new, right?

    The premise is original character, Stanislaw (AKA Stan) Migda, moves with his mother into the town of Springfield for her to get a job with DeCobray Industries. Even cursory fans of GI Joe can likely guess who is secretly in charge of this town. Surprisingly, there doesn’t appear to be any GI Joe to actually face Cobra this time despite the fact the terrorist organization is real and conducting EVIL EXPERIMENTS (da dummm) on the local students.

    Instead, the protagonists are Scarlet and Zoro-me (Snake Eyes) who, teamed up with a teenage hacker named Julien, aid Stanley in trying to keep Cobra from their dastardly deeds. The Baroness is a 10th grade student, Zartan is the principle, and Cobra Commander is, well, Cobra Commander. Other characters include the Hard Master and Soft Master running a local martial arts dojo, school guidance counselor Conrad Hauser, and Tommy Arashikage (AKA Storm Shadow) as another teenager.

    You could make a comparison between this book and fanfic school AUs but I hesitate to do that because that might imply I dislike this oddball re-imagining or think its amateur. I use X-men: Evolution as my standard because I think it’s actually quite good. It’s not what you would typically think of with GI Joe or I would have written but the uniqueness is hardly a strike against it. Indeed, I kind of wish they’d added more characters from the cartoon and toy line as students or staff. Is Firefly the science teacher? How about Lady Jaye and Flint as the prom queen and king? There’s a sequel to this novel and I picked it up as soon as I finished this one.

    There’s a fun Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew (or Alex Rider now that I think about it) energy to the piece as they increasingly come face to face with the fact their school is a bunch of guinea pigs for Cobra’s equivalent to AR glasses. There’s some genuinely spooky moments in the book with them, like the fact that Cobra uses them to manipulate people’s perception in real time. I shouldn’t be thinking of They Live during a Young Adult novel about GI Joe but the fact I am reminds me of some of the crazier Sunbow cartoons like when Shipwreck is subjected to mental torture in, yes, Springfield.

    This is definitely one of those novels that I would recommend a reader purchase the audiobook version of versus the ebook or paperback version. Shawn Compton manages to instill a kind of awkward young man’s energy into his narration and it works well for Stan (who I presume is named for OG GI Joe creator, Stan Weston). At just under five hours, it may be less of a book than you’d normally get for an audiobook credit but I really enjoyed it as an afternoon’s adventure.

    Are there some issues? Well, yes. Cobra getting bamboozled by a bunch of teenagers is going to rub some people the wrong way. Even the fact the novel is upfront that Cobra Commander could kill them at any time but doesn’t (seemingly more amused by their antics than threatened) doesn’t really do much to mitigate this fact. I also feel GI Joe: Classified is a poor title for the series and something like GI Joe: Academy or GI Joe: Teen Heroes would have been better. Still, I would recommend this for Real American (or International) Hero readers of eleven to, well, my age.

Available here

GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra review

    This is going to be less of a review than a retrospective and rant. GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra is fine. It's got a bunch of flaws and die hard nutjobs like myself will nitpick it to death about continuity changes but it's got decent action, comedy, and an update of the GI Joe premise. If they'd changed a few things here and there, it'd go from a three star movie to a four star action extravaganza. It's just the sequel that ran this incarnation of the franchise into the ground.

    The premise for GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra is a perfectly fine one. Duke (Channing Tatum) and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) are two American soldiers guarding a nano-tech warhead made by MARS arms manufacturing giant, James MacCullen (Christopher Eccelston), who is up to something nefarious. The warhead gets stolen by advanced super-soldiers led by the Baroness (Sienna Miller) and our heroes are recruited into GI Joe before they lose the warhead again. Duke is revealed to be the ex-lover of one of the Baroness and intends to "rescue" her.

    I don't mention it very often but I am very much a GI Joe fanboy. Given I'm an anarchist nutjob, this is a somewhat bizarre thing but I actually consider the toy commercial/military advertisement to be one of the most formulative things of my youth. I think my appreciation for female heroines probably comes from GI Joe (Scarlet, Lady Jaye, Jinx, The Baroness) and why I didn't develop into a weird guy who seems to think that every heroine kicking ass is somehow a threat to my fragile masculinity.

    GI Joe has consistently struggled to find itself a brand identity outside of the comics by Larry Hama (GI Joe's father in the way same Bill Finger is Batman's Stan Lee is Spider-Man's). Part of this may be the premise of a bunch of American soldiers fighting an evil terrorist organization bent on world conquest being a little too "real" after 2001. Part of it may be the fact it doesn't have quite the same broad international appeal as Transformers. Hogwash I say!

    My opinion of G.I. Joe is that I believe the biggest problem it has is that Hasbro is just handling the license terribly. Much the same with Dungeons and Dragons. They seem afraid of embracing the SHIELD versus Hydra sensibility that makes the work clique. It's strange because they have updated it a couple of times with Sigma Six and this very movie having our heroes be a broad collection of international heroes (ala Action Force). Michael Bay was basically made to make this movie and they got the Mummy guy to do it instead and he would have been fantastic...if he'd been allowed to tweek the script like he wanted.

    Famously, this was an unhappy production from everyone involved. Christopher Ecceleston hated playing Destro and I can't help but think it'd have been interesting to get David Tenant (an actual Scotsman and fellow Doctor Who) to do the role. Channing Tatum, an actual GI Joe fanboy about my age, hated the movie from top to bottom. He wanted to play Snake Eyes instead of Duke and, honestly, probably would have done a fantastic job. Both do a great job with what they're doing, Eccelston's bizarre accent choice aside, and aren't the problem with the movie.

    There's much to enjoy about GI Joe with Rachel Nicholson being a great actress I wish I'd seen more of (she was amazing in Continuum), Sienna Miller being the absolute best thing in the movie by far as the Baroness (even if she should be allowed to be bad!), Ray Park as Snake Eyes being the best sort of casting, and Lee Byung-hun is great as Storm Shadow. I even like Marlon Wayans as Ripcord even if they more or less had to invent his character whole cloth versus the comics/cartoons. The action is big, punchy, and electrifying with a great deal of fun to be had with fun toys on display. Everyone is pretty and there's lots of exploding things. It's a colorful James Bond movie and all the better for it.

    So what went wrong? It's tough to say but it's one of those cases where I feel like the minor tweaks lead to bigger problems. Joseph Gordon-Levitt would have been a fantastic Doctor Mindbender (he's clearly the only actor who understands he's in a live action cartoon other than possibly Ms. Miller) or Cobra Commander but combining the two makes no sense. Scarlet being a weird emotionally distant scientist is, again, not really her. Ripcord and her "relationship" comes off more like sexual harrassment and is weird when her two canon love interests are right there. Also, making the Baroness brainwashed gets rid of one of the great female villainesses of children's entertainment and also makes her romance with Destro into sexual assault.

    But weirdly, my biggest issue with the movie is the fact that GI Joe is a bunch of idiots. Throughout the movie, they fail to get anything done and get constantly outsmarted by Cobra. They fail to save the Eiffel Tower, they fail to stop the bad guys from getting their doomsday weapon, and they also let Cover Girl get killed (which is a problem with Hasbro--everyone is someone's favorite figurine). It's something that gets massively doubled-up on in the sequel when it's hard to say our heroes did anything right when London is destroyed. That's not a spoiler since it was in the trailer for the sequel.

    Larry Hama envisioned Cobra as a sort of populist Right Wing crypto-fascist movement in the Eighties and, basically, had the same idea as George Lucas. Cobra Commander would rise to power as a very American sort of dictator and manipulate events behind the scenes to take over the world. People, especially Americans, join Cobra because they want a better life and no longer trust their government. I can understand if Hasbro doesn't want that kind of political commentary in their books but this version of Cobra is all mind controlled and it undermines anything that would give the group punch. If Star Wars can destroy democracy with thunderous applause, so can GI Joe.

    Still, I occasionally watch this film when I want some entertainment. They are very pretty people and there's a lot of pew-pew as well as boom-boom. It has a sense of fun and adventure but if we'd had some of the character dynamics from the show/comics, I think it would have been slightly better. Okay, no, a lot better.

7/10 

Available here