GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra

I’m all for going to movies, kicking back, turning off your brain, and just hoping to have some fun. That’s really the only reason that I went to GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Despite the warning alarms my brain kept setting off after every spot or bit of footage I saw, I held out hope that the movie would be pure, escapist fun. Instead, I got the exact of opposite of fun. TRoCrepeatedly bashes you over the head with a stupid stick and is so blatantly horrible that you can’t turn your brain off.

Pretty much everything to do with the movie is poorly done. It all starts with Stephen Sommers’ direction. The feel of the entire movie is just wrong. There is not one of moment of genuine tension or character or emotion. I know, I’m talking about a GI Joe movie, so I shouldn’t care, but I like a little bit of substance in between my explosions. Besides, the action sucks. It doesn’t look cool (the futuristic weaponary was dumb) and it always feels completely staged. The action scenes look like what you would get out of a cartoon, and not in a good way. Due to poor CGI, it looks people riding in animated vehicles, or wearing animated suits. Say what you will about Bay and theTransformers movies, but the CGI is amazing. It looks like there is a giant robot running around blowing things up, where as the CGI in TRoC never interacts with the environment. During that horrible chase scene involving the accelerator suits, not once did it look like they were actually there.

The entire movie just has a silly and kiddy vibe to it. Bash Revenge of the Fallen’s plot all you want; TRoC makes it look like Memento. It is really just incredibly stupid. I said that Bay’s movies are like a kid playing with his toys, and it was awesome. This is the same principal, except this kid is stupid and has ADD. Every performance in this movie is just terrible, and not funny terrible like CAGEbot or Chris Klein. Channing Tatum was the complete wrong direction for Duke. Aside from the fact that he looks like bi-curious trailer trash, he is too young for the role and is never able to portray the perfect soldier. Marlon Wayans couldn’t have been less funny. All he does it spout one liners and make loud noises to make sure that the audience knows he’s black. If I ever see him, I will punch him square in the face (That’s not a threat; it’s a promise). Even Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobra Commander was bad and that really hurts me to say. He must have signed a deal with the devil that was something along the lines of “You will be blessed with great acting talent, and could even grow up to be the best actor of your generation, but you will have to be in a Stephen Sommers directed GI Joe movie.”

There are two good things about this movie: Snake Eyes and Sienna Miller. Ray Park continues to be the best thing in the movies he’s in (for those who don’t know, he was Darth Maul in Epsisode I). Snake Eyes gets all the cool scenes, doing sword moves and crazy flips, but I have to ask, why give his suit lips? Also, Sommers might be a bad director, but he does know how to make his leading ladies look good. From Rachel Weisz to Kate Beckinsale, Sommers consistently makes the women in his movies look awesome and Sienna Miller as The Baroness is no exception. She spends the entire movie in form fitting leather body suits and low cut dresses.

Look at me, talking about GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra likes it’s a real movie. It’s not. It’s a 100-minute, $175 million cartoon that is painful to watch for anyone over the age of 12. This movie is exactly like Cobra Commander says “This will hurt at first, and then more so.”