By Pat French
In the sequel files I analyze the redheaded stepchildren of our beloved film franchises, endeavoring to sort out the occasional gold nugget from the massive piles of Pyrite.
Today’s File, GI Joe Retaliation or “Blowing is Half the Battle”
So I may be in something of a minority here, but I actually kind of liked GI Joe: Rise of Cobra. We live in a time where movies based on toys are a far cry from the weirdest adaptations we’ll be experiencing (there’s a Monopoly movie on the books, not to mention Battleship…). After the utter crapstorm that has been the Transformers films, it was nice to see a director take a beloved toy property and make a movie that actually resembled someone playing with said toys. It’s not exactly a good movie, but it at least had some heart to it. Unlike the aforementioned Transformers films, director Stephen Sommers appears to have actually considered what it was that people liked about GI Joe and sat down to make a movie based on that. The vehicles and gadgets are utterly ridiculous. The bad guys motivations and methods were appropriately over the top. Plus Dennis Quaid assumes this stance every time he steps on screen as Commander Hawk.
Utter gold I tells ya.
Flash forward a couple years and we’ve got early buzz for a sequel starring The Rock. For the record, I’m totally a fan of Dwayne Johnson’s film career. With the exception of Doom, it’s not usually his performance that drags films down (indeed in the case of Be Cool it’s actually the opposite effect). However, shoehorning him into a sequel of a reasonably decent franchise film is indicative of a lack of faith from the studio end of things. Along with that, we have a new director: John Chu, whose previous credits were ALL dance movies. Oh yeah, and Bruce Willis is gonna cameo or something. For what it’s worth, a lot of the early teasers and scenes they released online looked decent enough. There was certainly the promise of at least one cool ninja battle. The movie is all set to come out in the summer of 2012, and then for some reason it’s pushed back to early 2013 and there are reports of reshoots.
So what happened? Is/was the movie so bad that they had no faith to release it in the summer? I assume there were probably a couple factors in play. For one, Channing Tatum (who was the main character in the first film) dies right at the beginning. In case you haven’t been paying attention, Channing Tatum’s career exploded between the release of Rise of Cobra and Retaliation. So reshoots to give him more screen time seems like a legit possibility. Also, this was the same year that Avengers and The Dark Knight rises came out. If I recall correctly, Retaliation would have come out between the two, and Avengers dominated the Box office for far longer than anyone anticipated. As big of name as the GI Joe brand is, it’s got nothing over Marvel and Batman.
Oh and one more factor might have had something to do with it, the film actually is pretty bad.
Where to start? Well for one, the aforementioned death of Channing Tatum’s Duke is only the tip of the iceburg in terms of the film’s disdain for its precursor. The only returning cast member on the GI Joe team is Ray Park as the silent ninja Snake Eyes. That’s right, the one cast-member they could have easily recast (not that they should have, Ray Park is the shizz) is the only one they retained. The GI Joe unit has evolved from being a colorful menagerie of military specialists into a bland unit of generic jarheads. Cobra is, all of a sudden, so under the radar of the American military that it’s agents proudly display their Cobra pins when they go to their jobs as THE SECRET EFFIN SERVICE. I mean understand that the Joes’ war with Cobra isn’t public knowledge, and certainly Zartan’s successful impersonation of the President would aid them in infiltrating the varied levels of the military, but how is it that literally nobody else in the world knows that their bad guys. Wouldn’t there be, like oversight committees or something?
Beyond just being a pointless departure from the first film, Retaliation is a structural mess. Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow are seemingly in a completely different movie from everyone else. Rza shows up in this B plot, delivering his lines in the manner of a bad 70’s Kung-Fu dub. Actually just about everyone who talks in this B plot is awful. Elodie Yung as Jinx delivers like three actual lines of dialogue before she remembers that Snake Eyes is a mute. Byung-hun Lee is decent enough, returning to the role of Storm Shadow, but his plot is (of course) a contrived mess.
Meanwhile, in the main plot (I think? I guess an argument could be made that Cobra are actually the protagonists of this film) The Rock and his surviving team-mates track down the only person who can possibly help them: Bruce Willis (Code-Name: Scenery Chomper). I can never tell with a bad Bruce Willis performance whether he’s being arrogant or just bored. I lean more towards bored with this film (rather than the “I’m the baddest ass here” attitude he adopts for the Expendables films). Anyway, the main plot sort of putters around waiting for the ninja plot to catch up so that everyone can be a part of the finale.
So what’s good about this movie? Not much. Jonathon Pryce gives a pretty entertaining performance as Zartan/ The President. I did get a pretty good laugh out of his scene with the rest of the leaders of the world’s nuclear powers just before the finale (it’s no Iron Sky, but few things are) . There’s a pretty sick extended ninja battle on a cliffside. Umm… The Rock isn’t terrible I guess.
So end result, what are we looking at? Well, the movie isn’t so bad that it merited being pushed back 9 months, but I can see why they did it. At the end of the day however, this film is mostly garbage. If you love (and I mean LOVE) GI Joe give it a watch, I guess. If you love action, watch it on mute. If you love The Rock, Youtube some old wrestlemanias. Everyone else: avoid if possible.