Review: 'G.I. Joe' Mission Goes Awry

Yes, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is worse than Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and yes, I know that probably won’t stop a lot of you and legions of 12-year-old boys from seeing it. But I’ll give it a try anyway.

G.I. Joe is the kind of movie where the majority of the budget was sucked up by special effects, leaving you with actors who come cheap and deliver their lines as if they were reading from a teleprompter—lines, by the way, that sound as if the screenwriter got paid by the cliché. It’s the kind of movie where the women (even if they are members of G.I. Joe or is a terrorist herself) inexplicably wear their hair loose and their Kevlar suits tight; the kind of movie that over-explains everything and convinces you of nothing, that thinks it’s still fresh to use the black guy as comic relief and that thinks it’s protecting its intended audience (little boys) by staging elaborate, deadly street chases where no one seems to get hurt.

That this is all almost beside the point is sad: Most people are probably going in to this movie with high expectations for nothing but the digital effects, bleeps, bangs, explosions, guns, bullets, interminable chases, etc. as if your hard-earned 12 bucks deserved no better fate. If that’s the case, you’re in for two very loud hours of decent action. If you’re a sucker looking for a bit of childhood nostalgia, you’re out of luck—there is little resembling to the '80s TV show.

The plot, such as it is, tracks the beginning of Duke (a brain-dead Channing Tatum) and Ripcord’s (Marlon Wayans) career with the titular super-elite counter-terrorism unit and involves a garden-variety megalomaniacal sociopath bent on reshaping the world to his liking via something called nanomites. There’s a good-girl-gone-bad involved (Sienna Miller). Riveting stuff, I assure you. To say that the characters are one-dimensional is to insult dimension. One blip of an exception is the back story between the evil Storm Shadow and his good guy counterpart Snake Eyes, who trained together in some sort of Asian temple as kids (God help me, I did enjoy watching the two little boys beat the crap out of each other) and face each other again as adults. Those two little dudes (Leo Howard and Brandon Soo Hoo) had genuine beef and more emotion in their performances than Tatum has in his little toe. I hope they didn’t get paid in candy. —Damarys Ocaña

SITV.COM Grade: D

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