When I tell people that I liked G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra people stare at me with a look that I can only believe they think will actually begin to melt my face like the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark. However, it’s true. Somehow the mashing together of a cheesy action B-movie with the silliness of knowing it’s all based on a toy line and throw in the mix that I was a big fan of the cartoon movie as a child — I can’t imagine the number of times I watched it on VHS — and you get a sense of built in fandom that I had for this pretty much throwaway feature from 2009 that renders me uselessly biased.
After we’re set up in the story as the Joes as we know them — by that I mean Channing Tatum — are all killed we’re left with Roadblock (Dwayne Johnson), Flint (D.J. Controna) and Jaye (Adrianne Palicki) to be the ones to carry out the battle against Cobra and resurrect the unit. Along the way we recruit a new ninja or two as well as General Colton (Bruce Willis) for the cause and bullets begin to fly.
One of the biggest things that hurt this film is the lack of Tatum, and I never knew there would be a time in my life that I would type a sentence like that. The first twenty minutes or so where we not only are introduced to Roadblock but see the relationship between these two best friends we are reminded why we loved Tatum in the first film, he’s sincerely adoring. He never comes off as anything other than completely charming and when his character leaves the film to only be replaced with the complete desire for revenge we as an audience completely miss that charm. The RETALIATION that the film cements as its core motivation never makes up for that missing element of Tatum and I hate myself for saying that.
Four years later they throw out a lot of the characters we fell in love with — I wanted more Scarlett guys — and throw a bit more dirt and grime on the franchise by adding the likes of Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and Ray Stevenson (playing Firefly) in the mix for a much more sinister and muscle bound film that I’m not sure actually worked out in its favour. Yes, there was a great (and I mean great) sequence of ninjas on an ice covered mountain doing incomprehensible things for the sake of having explosions beyond all wonders, and there was a lot of fun moments with Jonathan Pryce, playing Zartan playing the President, mocking North Korea in a really fun nuclear disarmament moment that I feel would’ve been perfect playing against some scenes from Dr. Strangelove, but in the long run I felt the movie lost a bit of that tongue in cheek gags that the first film had.
Regardless of the narrative and at times tonal problems that I had with the film it does have its gems — as you would expect with a film like this. I’ve already mentioned the much publicized scene of Snake Eyes and Jinx (Elodie Yung) on the mountain, but there is also some great moments of action fun towards the final battle between Joes and Cobras as well as a great moment in the film where we first catch up with Snake Eyes where we have a great cameo performance from Walton Goggins that just cannot be ignored. Like everything we see Goggins in now (post-Justified existing) he happens to grasp the scene by the balls and just enrapture us all with his very smarmy nature that we love even though we know we should be running far away.