As far as this year’s mega-budget summer blockbusters based on 1980’s animated television programs designed toadvertise crappy plastic Hasbro toys to children, director Stephen Sommers’ G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra turns out to be a slightly more pleasurable experience than Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. But then again, so is a prolapsed colon—we’re talking seriously faint praise here.
The Joes are a top-secret elite unit of supersoldiers with an absurd amount of futuristic hardware. Dennis Quaid’s General Hawk is the gruff, no-nonsense leader, and the actor sadly surveys the ashes of a once-brilliant career when barking Reagan-Era cartoon catch-phrases such as, “knowing is half the battle.” A shady Scottish arms manufacturer over-played by Christopher Eccleston has built, developed and then stolen a suitcase full of warheads infested with some new green technology that eats through metal like a cloud of emerald termites. The Joes chase him all over the globe, using all sorts of miraculous gadgets, including what appears to be an iPhone app that allows you to watch dead people’s memories on your PDA.
Sommers is the ADD-addled auteur who brought you Van Helsing, and as usual he seems incapable of helming a moment that doesn’t involve at least three swooping crane moves and a background cluttered by digital shit. There don’t seem to be very many laws of physics applied here, whether the Joe’s are in power-suits ripped off from Iron Man or the feuding sibling ninjas are soaring though the air clashing swords. A mid-movie sequence flattening Paris is such an absurd spectacle, with so many demolished cars, colliding trains and flattened landmarks the movie starts to feel like a remake of Team America: World Police without the jokes.
As none of the objects in the movie seem to weigh very much, the destruction turns tedious quickly. The only scenes that kick to life involve an overheated melodramatic backstory between Channing Tatum’s gung-ho Sergeant Duke and Sienna Miller’s evil Baroness. These two suffer from inconveniently timed flashback episodes of such a goofy, cliché-ridden romantic history that for these brief interludes G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra becomes so bad it’s good. The rest of the time it’s so bad it’s boring. D+
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1. yIntagh said... on Aug 12, 2009 at 01:36PM
“Soaking a prolapsed colon in saltwater would be more enjoyable than Bayformers.”