“I've been thinking,” says Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) near the beginning of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, to which his friend and comrade-in-arms Duke (Channing Tatum) replies, “I warned you about that.” Clearly director Stephen Sommers (The Mummy, its sequels, Van Helsing) took this to heart: in the first five minutes, a squad of sinister but anonymous super-soldiers led by a literal supermodel (Sienna Miller as “the Baroness,” formerly Duke’s fiancée, Anna) seize a top-secret weapon from a U.S. military convoy “with extreme prejudice,” as they say in these sorts of movies, setting the tone for everything that follows.
Like Michael Bay’s Transformers films, G.I. Joe is unabashedly, almost gleefully stupid. Looking for a three-dimensional character among its cast is like looking for Oscar winners in a Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer flick (these are the fellows who have given us Disaster Movie, Date Movie, Epic Movie, and Meet the Spartans, if their names haven’t quite gained the recognizability of marquee status yet
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G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra Directed by Stephen Sommers Starring Channing Tatum, Dennis Quaid, Sienna Miller, Rachel Nichols, Marlon Wayans, Brendan Fraser, Jonathan Pryce
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But Sommers has made a career out of balancing tepid film-making with computer-generated spectacle, sometimes successfully (1999’s The Mummy) and sometimes less so (Van Helsing and the last two Mummy sequels). Here his efforts have landed him squarely in the middle with something energetic enough to entertain but not involving enough to succeed.
Basically, the Joes have to reclaim the weaponry before it can be used against the innocent people of the world–standard fare. But the narrative is peppered with uproariously ludicrous flashbacks to the recent and distant personal histories of main characters.
There is the past relationship between Duke and Anna (rendered with about as much pathos as an episode of Beavis and Butthead); a bewildering and violent rivalry between the two opposing teams’ respective martial arts experts (introduced so abruptly it plays like a comedic Family Guy vignette); and let us not forget the distant ancestral past of primary antagonist James McCullen (Christopher Eccleston), which involves a Man in the Iron Mask-type punishment sowing an apparently deathless seed of vengeance into his 17th century forebear.
The cast does all that could be expected of it, which by and large amounts to looking like a crop of Abercrombie models fresh out of the gym. In Wayans’s case this also means enacting the “token black guy” trope with vigor – he is the reassuring jokester to Tatum’s level-headed hero-protagonist. (It could also be noted that the only other black principal actor, Nigerian Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, was cast in a stereotypical “bodybuilder-cum-bad-ass” role as the hulking Heavy Duty, G.I. Joe’s ordnance specialist.)
Dennis Quaid appears as Commander Hawk, the stern general and cardboard cut-out character who barks orders and oversees the stock “control room celebration” scene after a successful mission. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, unrecognizable in make-up and costume, marks the end of an illustrious indie film career in his role as the Doctor (future Cobra Commander); it will be interesting to see whether he stays in the mainstream after this. And Jonathan Pryce has a walk-on role as the U.S. President.
G.I. Joe aficionados who have followed the franchise from toy to comic book to televised cartoon may not find all the elements they expect out of a Joe movie. Cobra, the evil counterpart to the G.I. Joe organization, is more of an afterthought, with arch-villain Destro christened only after the film’s climax; and the usual Hollywood liberties have been taken with the rest of the source material.
What Joe succeeds at, if fleetingly, is taking viewers back to age eight or nine when a sandbox and a gaggle of plastic action figures were the only requirements for a wonderful afternoon. The Joe team’s physics-transcending accelerator suits give rise to the film’s best action sequence and seem destined to start another decade of Joe merchandising. There is a staggering array of vehicles, gizmos, and weapons to match the imagination of even the most creative little tyke.
Whether the action becomes tedious depends on one’s tolerance for mediocre CGI (that’s right, folks), or perhaps whether one has been permanently inured to it by the Transformers films. And for the sake of the children we can at least be grateful that G.I. Joe, unlike Revenge of the Fallen, is not stuffed to the gills with inappropriate pot-smoking humour and sexual innuendo.
But even if you find yourself enthralled by the bombastic spectacle of it all, the violent, Mach 3 pageantry, as the climax approaches and the characters are imperilled by insidious plots . . . don’t expect to care.