G.I. Joe: Rise of The
Cobra
There
was a time when Lee Marvin would recruit Charles Bronson and 11 other badasses for top missions, then
Lee Marvin lowered his standards and just built a Delta Force around Chuck
Norris. These days we’ve got Dennis Quaid as this generation’s answer to authoritative
gruffness and a Brendan Frasier cameo is what counts for macho cred. But fear not
movie lovers, it’s not as bad as it sounds, this movie
is actually a pretty damn good time.
The film deals
with a Megaforce style megaforce
of supertroopers assembled from the world’s armies to
succeed when all else fails. I guess
since they didn’t get involved in Rwanda, Chechnya, Iraq or Yugoslavia, they
consider those to have been successfully handled situations. Or they were just busy training and flirting
with each other or marvelling in the awe of a Brendan Frasier cameo. They’ve picked a location with lots of
parking but that is a bitch of a commute out in the Sahara desert for their
secret underground fortress.
They’ve got all
sorts of crazy technology including your requisite omniscient computer. They try to get information on the identities
of the terrorists by searching their computer saying that everybody gets
photographed somewhere at some point and I guess there’s somebody uploading
this stuff to the megacomputer. Man, I’d be disappointed if I made it into
the elite G.I. Joe Force only to find out my job was scanning in high school
yearbooks and browsing Facebook pages.
The film overcomes its initial casting difficulties
and provides a good time at the movies.
The heroes are weaker in the charisma department than the villains, but
stronger in skill. The heroes are mostly
your standard group of militaristic asskickers with
no extra details to make them memorable. You’ve got: strong handsome young guy with
something to prove, cocky skirt-chasin’ wise-assed
black dude, brainiac hot chick, big strong quiet guy,
and then there’s one character who I think makes it impossible for fans to get
upset about mishandling the source material because as far as I can tell he
actually is just a six foot plastic action figure. They have some flashbacks of how he used to
be a normal little boy who gets involved in a lifelong international feud
because he tried to steal another boy’s shrimp one time. (Do you see how wars start?) They skip over the part where his soul gets
put into an action figure like Chucky, but I’m sure that will be covered in the
sequel. But most of these actors playing
the heroes should stick to their gigs on One Tree Hill or whatever show
it is that pays their bills.
Their main
enemy in this is a Scottish arms dealer, who despite coming from a long line of
backstabbing traitors, has built a respectable world class industry named MARS
that provides arms to what I think they said was well over two thirds of the
world market. Which makes me wonder:
does he sells his best toys to G.I. Joe knowing he’s
eventually going to have to fight them?
Or do they get their gear somewhere else? And if so, why isn’t that arms dealer the top
one in the world? Also, do they do like
Howard Hughes and use the same principles to design both planes and bras? Because these ladies get
some major support in this film.
Seriously, I always thought ‘push-ups’ in the army referred to the
exercise move. Anyhoo,
what MARS lacks in strategy it makes up for in crooked economics. They got the world to foot the bill for
development of some evil termite bombs and now they’re going to steal them back
and use them themselves.
I guess they emptied
their own piggybank building a fortress under the polar ice caps. The smart chick in this picture says it’s the
ideal location because its impossible to find and easy
to defend. I suppose nobody is concerned
about those polar ice caps melting and nobody is up there doing geology studies
that will notice tanks and jets flying out of ice caves, but that ‘easy to
defend’ part just doesn’t ring true to me.
Is it really easiest to defend in a location where you can be attacked
from all sides and your enemies can make the most of their numbers? King Leonidas would
disagree. Oh, yeah, and, “SPARRRRRTTAAAAAA!”
The Scottish
arms dealer guy is probably the least entertaining of the heroes. He’s your standard icy speechifying
megalomaniac. His pals are a hell of a
lot more fun. One is an evil doctor, who
despite having his skin bleached and melted and forced into wearing a Darth
Vader mask and monocle, he’s still got a shred of vanity about his looks and
sports a wig, but later he accepts his baldness and takes it off. The mad scientist has bred an army of drones
who feel no fear, no morality, no pain and are immune
to snake venom. I would’ve worked on
making them bullet-resistant first because I can’t think of the last time an
army attacked wielding snakes like whips, but since that’s the type of thing
that actually would happen in this film I won’t hold it against the evil
doctor.
Cobra’s forces
also include a Baroness, who’s been placed undercover to marry a top scientist
who can activate the termite bombs. Although, her status as the scientist’s wife for years doesn’t
really help. It’s not like she
just asks him to activate the bombs as a nonchalant marital favour like taking
out the garbage or cleaning out the garage.
There’s not even an ironic “honey” or “dear” when she
kicks down the door to his lab and points a pistol at his head and reveals
herself to be part of an international terror squad and demands that he
activate the bombs. And I think when
you’re the one man with the skill to activate a globally destructive weapon
that will clearly be used, you kinda owe it to the
rest of us to refuse to do so and take that bullet like a man.
The movie
delivers non-stop silliness and action.
The best action scene is the chase through Paris in supersuits
that turn the Joes into The Flash. Other
parts are cobbled together from other action movies. You’ve got a nice finale in an underwater
fortress straight out of The Spy Who Loved Me. There’s also a part where they felt they had
to outdo Clint Eastwood piloting a magic jet by thinking in Russian in Firefox,
so they have a jet that only responds to commands in a language that died
before jets, missiles, and ejector seats were invented. But this movie doesn’t just feel like a bunch
of ripoffs and references of other stupid
movies. G.I. Joe: Rise of The Cobra brings its own sauce to the stupid steak. And since I did not bother to see Transformers
2: Rise of The Fallen or Terminator 4: Rise of
The Salvation, this becomes 2009’s best summer blockbuster flick by
default. Congratulations. But I also look forward to a sequel with a
fully erect cobra right off the bat.
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