Blockbusters deserve to be viewed on a different scale than dramas/period pieces/biographies/oscar bait. Unlike those movies, they don’t aim to win awards or critical praise. They aim to entertain the masses through action sequences and special effects, not riveting plots and top-notch acting.
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra solidifies this.
When deadly warheads come into the hands of James McCullen (Christopher Eccleston) and his band of assassins, Anastasia ‘Ana’ DeCobray/Baroness (Sienna Miller), Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee) and Rex Lewis/The Doctor (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the G.I. Joe unit takes action to retrieve them. Helping out the Joes are army brats Duke (Channing Tatum) and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans), who were in charge of the warheads before they were stolen. Making up the Joes are Snake Eyes (Ray Park), Shana ‘Scarlett’ O’Hara (Rachel Nichols), Breaker (Saïd Taghmaoui) and Heavy Duty (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), led by General Hawk (Dennis Quaid).
As you can tell, the plot is thin. That’s to be expected. Films such as G.I. Joe don’t rely on plots. As long as the plot is coherent, it’ll work for the film. Luckily for Joe, theirs does. The main selling point, after all, is the action and special effects.
Speaking of which, the action itself is good. It’s entertaining enough and there’s plenty of it (the chase through Paris steals the show and is worth the admission alone). The special effects, however, are cruddy. The nanomites look hokey and the air sequences are badly computer generated. The typical action, such as gun shots and explosions, do look good, however. The action makes up for the bad CGI, balancing it out. I will take good action, but bad CGI over bad action, but good CGI any day.
My cardinal complaint is that, up until the closing act, this didn’t feel like G.I. Joe. It felt like a mindless and entertaining action flick, but not the 80’s cartoon and toy brand it was based off of. The only character that felt remotely close to its original incarnation was Snake Eyes. I was originally going to give this a 60% because of it, but it does pull itself together near the end and establishes some of the characters.
Cobra may not feel like G.I. Joe until the end, but it’s still a fun trip. It’s not going to be remembered for ages, nor is it going to get critical acclaim. It will, however, get a bucketload of money, product tie-ins, sequels and a following.
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is an entertaining popcorn flick. It’s just not entirely G.I. Joe.