Cobra Commander

MOVIE REVIEW: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009)

Review written Nov 9 2009, rediscovered 2023, and posted unaltered.

G.I. JOE: The Rise of Cobra (2009)

Directed by Stephen Sommers

I am a hardcore GI Joe fan, but only Real American Hero and its continuations. As such I am very critical of some of the liberties taken with the characters in this movie, but in the end I was pretty satisfied with the movie. Read on!

Rise Of Cobra is interesting in that Cobra and its commander don’t really exist for most of the movie. Instead, Destro and his M.A.R.S. organization are the heavies, with some support from the beautiful Baroness Anastasia DeCobray, the ninja Storm Shadow, and Zartan the master of disguise. Thus, this movie chronicles the rise of Cobra Commander and his terrorist organization determined to rule the world.

It is the “near future”. The original Marvel comic as written by Larry Hama was based on actual military tactics, history, and machines, while enhanced with lots of futuristic touches such as laser cannons and Jump-jet packs. This movie updates the franchise for the new millenium. New technology here include nanomites, accelorator suits, and other gadgets. Yet even so, updated versions of classic vehicles such as the Night Raven jet and V.A.M.P. jeeps appear. Basically, just as GI Joe was futuristic for the 80’s, this is futuristic for the now.

The acting here is bad bordering on terrible. This Channing Tatum guy can’t act at all. Dennis Quaid pours the cheeze-wiz on every line of dialogue that General Hawk delivers. Marlon Wayons (Rip Cord), Rachel Nichols (Scarlet), and Sienna Miller (Baroness) are passable. The heavies tend to get the best roles and the best actors: Arnold Vosloo (Zartan) steals every scene he is in, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt is surprisingly serpentine as Cobra Commander. Christopher Eccleston is good as the Scottish arms dealer Destro, just menacing enough while also dignified and cool. Also, it’s nice to see Jonathan Pryce in anything.

The direction, by that hack Stephen Sommers (The Mummy) is gawd-awful. He throws awkward flashback scenes in frequently with no real sense of flow. Check out The Watchmen for how to effectively do a flashback. His action scenes are pretty damn exciting, but you get a sense that a better director could have provided some more fluidity.

I’ll give you an example. The climactic sword fight between Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow is decent, and Ray Park of course is the best at what he does. However, when you compare what he does here as Snake Eyes to what he did as Darth Maul, it’s underwhelming. That’s because the director doesn’t know how to shoot a scene like this, that should be an epic monumental battle.

And speaking of Darth Maul, what’s with the blatant Star Wars ripoffs? “Stay on target! Eject!” Double-bladed sword fights, taking place in a room that looked a hell of a lot like like the one in Phantom Menace?

And what’s with Brendan Fraser’s cameo? Did he ever speak more than 4 words in a row, or was he basically just grunting?

Anyway, if you can ignore these quibbles what you have here is a sci-fi action film with some cool gimmicks and is very enjoyable. The die hard Marvel fas get a Larry Hama cameo, as well as nice touches like Breaker chewing some bubble gum and General Hawk in a wheelchair. Even Storm Shadow’s fate echoes back to what happened in the Marvel series, and I can’t wait to see it play out in the next movie. Even though I think Snake Eyes taking a vow of silence is beyond stupid.

DVD special features are pretty scarce even on this 2-disc edition. There are no deleted scenes so, unfortunately, I am certain that some sort of deluxe edition is coming. That scene from the trailer when Destro asks, “What did you say your unit was called again?” and Hawk responds, “I didn’t,” isn’t in the movie. There are definitely scenes out there that didn’t make the cut. You get the audio commentary track with the entertaining Sommers (I may not like his work but that doesn’t mean I don’t like him as a person) and two featurettes. I think this lack of extras is a bit of a ripoff and I could care less about the digital copy.

This movie is obviously the first of a franchise (Dennis Quaid is signed to three films) and it really whets the appetite for the next film. There’s even a cliffhanger/teaser ending. You only really get to know five or six Joes so I’m anxious to see who will depicted in the next film. My personal wishlist includes Stalker, and I hope Major Bludd shows up too.

If you’re a fan of action films and you don’t care about acting or realism, you’ll dig GI Joe. If you’re a diehard like me, you’ll love seeing some of the toys you owned flying around on screen. I would say that GI Joe was a more successful adaptation than the dreadful Transformers films.

3/5 stars.  Very flawed, but acceptably entertaining.

MOVIE REVIEW: G.I. Joe: Retaliation (Extended Action Cut) 2013

“We’re the Four fuckin’ Horsemen / Back for a second time.”

G.I. JOE: Retaliation (2013)

Directed by Jon M. Chu

I’m sorry if you saw the first movie, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009). That lowly turd of a film is one that I own, but can only sit through by splitting it into two or more sittings. Never in one. I saw it this way recently, and I managed to make it through. The movie was crap, and so was the toyline that went with it. All garbage. I don’t care to review the movie again, so to quote from my own old Amazon 2/5 star writeup:

The acting here is bad bordering on terrible. This Channing Tatum guy can’t act at all. Dennis Quaid pours the cheeze-wiz on every line of dialogue that General Hawk delivers. Marlon Wayons (Rip Cord), Rachel Nichols (Scarlet), and Sienna Miller (Baroness) are passable. The heavies tend to get the best roles and the best actors: Arnold Vosloo (Zartan) steals every scene he is in, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt is surprisingly serpentine as Cobra Commander. Christopher Eccleston is good as the Scottish arms dealer Destro, just menacing enough while also dignified and cool. Also, it’s nice to see Jonathan Pryce in anything…The direction by that hack Stephen Sommers (The Mummy) is gawd-awful.

Pryce was in the first movie far too briefly to be of any consequence to the finished product. That and many of the other weaknesses with the first film were dealt with here in G.I. Joe: Retaliation. Most of the cast was jettisoned. Wisely, Ray Park and Lee Byung-hun were retained as the iconic ninjas Snake-Eyes and Storm Shadow. Cobra Commander was re-cast (Gordon-Levitt being unnecessary and expensive behind a silver mask). Otherwise only Pryce, Arnold Vosloo and Channing Tatum survive to the second film. Even though Dennis Quaid was contracted to do three movies, leadership has fallen to Tatum’s Duke. Newcomers include Duke’s buddy Roadblock (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) and new recruits Jady Jaye, Flint, and Jinx.

Another issue that I had with the first film was that I felt the tech was too sci-fi and outlandish. This is tamed down a tad in this movie, although everything is still futuristic enough. The bad guys don’t all have ray guns and anti-gravity jets and shit this time. They usually fire bullets and fly helicopters and jets and stuff. The characters and vehicles look more like the original toys did. There are things such as the HISS (High Speed Sentry) tanks that look like the toys you had. Roadblock looks like the figure you had, or wanted (in my case the latter). So does Cobra Commander, finally.

JOE 46Anyway that’s all window dressing if there’s no story. The story is this: Master of disguise Zartan is still impersonating the President of the United States (Jonathan Pryce, who is the real star of the movie). Cobra Commander and Destro are still imprisoned, but the Commander is freed by his ninja Storm Shadow. With the explosives expert Firefly (another toy you wanted), they engineer the betrayal and destruction of the entire G.I. Joe team. Only a handful survive. Then the President replaces them with the services of a new security contractor called Cobra.

There’s also a new Ultimate Weapon called Zeus which is pretty silly physics-wise, because in real life it wouldn’t work. (If a satellite merely “dropped”, ie: let go of, a rod of tungsten, the tungsten would simply settle into the same orbit as the satellite.) We’ll overlook this because BOOM! DADOOOM! KABLAAAMM! SLASH! SWISH! SWING! There’s action. There’s a frickin’ battle with ninjas hanging off the side of a mountain, people. It makes no sense in any sort of real physical way but it looks nifty and must have looked great in 3D in theaters. I found it odd that the G.I Joe team is the only military force in the world today operating without any sort of helmet or hat or head gear of any kind.

Pic from yojoe.com

Joe Colton pic from yojoe.com

Back to the story, G.I. Joe has been wiped out.  The Rock and his friends need help, so they go to the only man they know they can trust: Bruce Willis. In the original Marvel comics and Hasbro toyline (fuck Sunbow), Joe Colton was the original, retired G.I. Joe. In fact his code name was “G.I. Joe”. Willis is the perfect choice to play this hard-ass and I have to admit it’s big fun to see him and the Rock kicking ass in the same scenes.

As a self-proclaimed Marvel Comics Joe nerd, the original gospel of Larry Hama is all. I enjoyed that this movie tended to go back to the original source material for ideas more so than the original film did. I won’t get into specifics too much, except to say that certain things especially in relation to Snakes and Stormy reflect events that happened in the comics. Staying truer to the strong source material (Hama was no slouch) only helps the movie which otherwise is just a collage of BOOM!

As for the Blu-ray, I was pleased to hear a balanced 7.1 surround mix.  I was a bit baffled to hear The Four Horsemen’s “Back In Business Again” in the movie soundtrack, but more power to ’em.  I didn’t watch too many of the special features.   I did watch both versions of the film (the “Extended Action Cut” is on the Blu and the theatrical on the DVD) but I don’t have any impressions of which is better.  Most recently I watched the extended version and it was plenty cool.

3/5 stars

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