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G.I. JOE: The Rise of Cobra - Does it pass muster?

Thanks to passes from a couple of sources here in Austin , I was able to take a few friends out to see the latest Hasbro toy line-based live action film, G.I. JOE: The Rise of Cobra, a day early.

I was just hoping Ray Park (Snake Eyes), Dennis Quaid (General Hawk) and Christopher Eccleston (Destro) would all be awesome.

G.I. JOE starts in France , circa 1641, where McCullen has been found guilty of treason for selling weapons to both sides during a war.  Rather than being put to death, he is forced to wear a fresh from the fire metal helmet, so that no one would see his face again.  Before the helmet is put on him, he vows that his sons, their sons and their sons would continue what he had started, with the goal of not only supplying weapons for, but controlling the wars being fought.

Fast forward to the not too distant future, and General Hawk is sitting in on a meeting with Cover Girl, listening to the latest in the line of McCullens talking about M.A.R.S. weapons technology, specifically a new kind of nanoweapon originally designed to cure cancer but was found to have military applications instead.  Four warheads with the new technology would be under military escort from the M.A.R.S. manufacturing plant to a NATO base.

Enter Duke and Ripcord, the Marines tasked with escorting the warheads from Point A to Point B.

The convoy comes under attack by the Baroness, and G.I. JOE’s Alpha Team, consisting of Heavy Duty, Snake Eyes, Scarlett, and Breaker, arrive on the scene, and keep the warheads out of Cobra hands.  Duke and Ripcord stay with the warheads, and are taken to the Pit in the Egyptian desert, G.I. JOE’s base of operations.

A training montage follows, which includes Brendan Fraser mugging while Duke and Snake Eyes spar each other, and then Duke and Ripcord become members of the Alpha Team.

Eventually, Cobra gets the warheads, gets them weaponized, and targets the Eiffel Tower in Paris .

Alpha Team tracks Cobra to the Artic Circle , where McCullen has set up a base of operations under an ice shelf.  Battles ensue, daring feats of heroics on the part of Alpha Team, and a traitor is revealed.

As expected, there are quite a few G.I. JOE catchphrases peppered throughout the movie.  Ripcord makes the comment to Heavy Duty that he has “a real kung fu grip.”  Duke is called “a real American hero!” General Hawk tells Alpha Team that “knowing is half the battle.” And Heavy Duty is the one who gets to yell “Yo Joe!”

And, since I’m not that into G.I. JOE (I had the some of the toys & would occasionally watch the cartoon as a kid), I’m not sure if the relationships within the movie are consistent with what’s been established by the franchise in the past.  The film depicts a romantic relationship between Duke and the Baroness, for starters.  It’s shown that the Baroness and Cobra Commander are siblings.  Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes were trained by the same master as children, and Storm Shadow trained the Baroness when she joined Cobra.

Most of those were established by flashbacks.  Duke has them when thinking about the Baroness, Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow both think back to their childhood training, Cobra Commander has a flashback when explaining things to Duke, and the Baroness gets flashes of Duke in her mind, as well.

There are plenty of high tech vehicles in the movie, too; my favorites being the Cobra sub with GPS and the Cobra jet that takes orders in Celtic.  I thought that the use of holograms was a bit too much.  It seemed like any time there were three or more characters in a room together, two of them would turn out to be holographic signals.

There seemed to me to be only one truly retarded scene – Duke tells Hawk who the Baroness is, and even pulls a picture of the two of them together & shows it while saying who she is.  After the training montage, Breaker is all proud because they identified the Baroness.

Ripcord is used primarily for comic relief, but in a team of international military specialists, best of the best types, he really does seem like a token.  When the scores from the training montage are brought up, General Hawk says that Ripcord is good enough, thanks to averaging his scores against Duke’s (affirmative action).  In Paris , when the team is arrested, Ripcord gets beat down by Parisian police.  Later in the movie, he’s arrested again.  And when flying the Cobra jet, when Scarlett tells him that it may respond to commands in another language, one of the phrases for “fire” he yells out, “Bust a cap!”

And because Jason likes it when I mention music, stick around for the initial end credits that are revealed to be the Hawk unit symbol for G.I. JOE, and you’ll get to hear a remixed to death version of the Black Eyed Peas ‘Boom Boom Pow’.  Other than that, the music wasn’t too noticeable over all the explosions and gun fire.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie, and I wasn’t disappointed by Ray Park, Dennis Quaid or Christopher Eccleston’s performances.  There’s an obvious set-up for a sequel, which I saw coming a mile away, but still heard folks in the audience go, “Oh?!” when it was revealed.

So, I’ll probably go see the sequel, too, if it comes out and if I can get into it for free.

Tom Sharp
Austin , Texas

http://www.austinpangeeks.org

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