"When all else fails, we don't." General Hawk (Dennis Quaid) utters that ridiculous line to Duke and Ripcord (Channing Tatum, Marlon Wayans) early in G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra shortly before his highly trained special missions force gets their home base invaded, Hawk himself badly wounded and the first of three losing skirmishes against the minions of COBRA, a ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world. I couldn't help but think to myself,"Yup, you win." After all, if you're going to make that kind of boast, you'd better be able to back it up.
At the center of the world-dominating plan is a form of nanotechnology-small robots, in essence-which eats away at anything metal. The tech falls into the hands of COBRA and it's up to the Joe team to recover it. Sounds simple, right?
One of the only things this first live action film based on the Hasbro toy line gets right is the way it introduces the concept of G. I. Joe to the audience. In nearly every summer spectacle flick designed to start a franchise, we have to watch the team be assembled, work through their kinks and ultimately emerge victorious as one unified group in the end. Here, the nuts and bolts of the team are already in place-Snakes Eyes (Ray Park), Scarlett (Rachel Nichols), Heavy Duty (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and Breaker (Saïd Taghmaoui)-while the bad guys are more or less formed themselves. The script wisely saves times by jumping straight into the story itself. And the other thing it gets right? The very first scene centering on a very famous mask. (Had the rest of the movie continued in this vein, Rise of Cobra would have been an unqualified hit.)
Director Stephen Sommers simply bites off more than he can reasonably chew, given where the characters and situation come from. He continually forgets G. I. Joe is a toy line, a comic book and a cartoon. This isn't Shakespeare or a New York Times bestseller adaptation. This is A Real American Hero. Good guys named Shipwreck and Lady Jaye and Barbecue. Bad guys known as Tomax and Xamot, Nemesis Enforcer and Serpentor. While it is admirable the writers wanted to give the characters depth and a back story, who cares? All the audience needs to know is Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow have been nemeses going back to childhood. And, for heaven sake, the story doesn't need the convoluted history between Duke and the Baroness, let alone the inclusion of the character known as The Doctor. This should have been a lean 90 minute flick. Instead, it balloons up to 118 minutes on the back of mundane flashbacks. Sommers leads the movie from one kung-fu action grip sequence to another, occassionally stopping to allow the characters to speak or move the plot along.
Ah, the plot. Bad guys try to take tech from good guys. Explosion needless flashback explosion. Bad guys attack good guys and recover tech. Explosion needless flashback disguised as exposition explosion. Bad guys and good guys tangle. Bad guys win. Explosion explosion needless flashback. Bad guys and good guys tangle. Bad guys win. Explosion...well, you get the picture. It's as if the CGI-heavy sequences were supposed to advance the characters and plot in a meaningful way. They don't. Because, ya know, if the Joe headquarters actually had security, the whole movie would never have happened. (Yes, the Pit has ACME guards headed by Chief Wiggum and the Ministry of Magic guys from Harry Potter.)
I can't help but feel the material contained in this movie would have been better used as a prequel comic, much like Star Trek Countdown laid the groundwork for the May's Star Trek. Flashback here, tell evil plot there, get the magic tech from point A to point B. Really, the signature characters of Cobra Commander and Destro don't even show up until the final five minutes of the film and only for a brief moment at that. The Rise of Cobra even has the gall to set up its own sequel, refusing to wrap up a subplot. One has to wonder what would have happened if the movie tanked and there was no sequel.
Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Taghmaoui get virtually nothing to do, considering the movie is split pretty evenly between the two sides and the Wayans/Tatum pairing is pushed to the forefront. Interestingly, the Baroness is given much more to do here than in any episode of the TV series. I guess someone has a fetish for rail thin women in black leather. But it all comes down to this singular question: who cares? Big deal a bunch of stuff blew up and people yelled and the script got in a few jabs at the franchise ("knowing is half the battle" is brought up twice, "a real American hero" once, the Baroness uses a particle accelerator belonging to de Cobray). Why does any of this matter? To be honest, it doesn't. It's a passable ride for two hours, but nothing more.
They could have at least inserted a Public Service Announcement at the end of the picture. Just because.