G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra Review
The Best of the Worst
One has to see quite a few horrible high tech action pictures before it's possible to appreciate one as okay as G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra. It’s not a great film but the summer of 2009 has been host to some of the most staggeringly awful big budget, CGI aided duds imaginable ranging from X-Men Origins to Night at the Museum 2 and right up to the stinkiest of them all: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
If this is what blockbuster filmmaking has become in this technically advanced age than at least G.I. Joe conducts itself with humor, energy and a keen sense of detail. The Transformers sequel was an empty, formless, stupid mess: a hollow thump inside an empty tin can. G.I. Joe is at least, if nothing more, entertaining.
G.I. Joe Works for All the Reasons Transformers Doesn't
G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra then works for all of the reasons that Transformers didn’t. Both are big and silly, based on children’s toys, light on character and heavy on wall-to-wall action and computer generated effects, but where Transformers was founded on a premise that invested no emotional attachment in anything other than what might be blowing up at the moment, director Stephen Sommers (The Mummy, Van Helsing) on the other hand, has a keen eye for visual flair and works overtime constructing detailed action sequences to involve his characters in.
It couldn’t have been more meaningless if the Transformers succeeded in blowing up the sun, but against all reason and logic, although the plot makes no more sense, there is a certain level of suspense as Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) breaks the sound barrier in a high powered jet, trying to catch the warhead destined for Washington before it meets its target.
McCullen and His Nanomites
That warhead was developed by the evil McCullen and contains a new weapon called Nanomites: little insect like computers that, when dispatched, eat everything in sight and keep on going until the killswitch is pressed. They also act as a physical human enhancement, dulling the senses to a point where, not only can the subject feel no pain, but can be remote controlled by the vile Doctor (an unrecognizable star whose identity best not be revealed).
After McCullen is G.I. Joe, a top secret elite military fighting team headed by General Hawk (Dennis Quaid) whose base is located somewhere beneath the lumbering sand dunes of the Sahara desert, which get’s one to thinking: how does one go about reinforcing a sand dune with millions of tons of metal and concrete and other neat looking hardware in order to concoct these secret hideouts? At least McCullen’s hidden Arctic iceberg lair is more practical from an architectural standpoint no? Forget it; there is no time spared to deal with such silly contrivances.
No Logic Allowed
Logic is not the film’s strong suit, but unlike the just plain dumb Transformers, G.I. Joe is just engaging enough as to not allow it’s absurdity get in the way of its entertainment value as Duke (Channing Tatum), Ripcord, and others including a mute ninja in a full body leather getup (don’t ask) hunt down McCullen and his henchwoman Baroness (Sienna Miller), who, for dramatic purposes, used to be Duke’s fiancée until her brother was killed in Afghanistan under his command, through land, air and even underwater.
The center point of the film is an action sequence of absolute brilliance set in the streets of Paris as Duke and Ripcord dawn special suits that enhance all of their physical capabilities, chase Baroness and her men on their way to obliterating the Eiffel Tower for, really, no better reason than to display how advanced technology has become in a shot where many innocent civilians run from the tower as it slowly crumbles to the ground.
What’s rare about the sequence is how Sommers isn’t afraid to pull back and let the action breathe without sacrificing the film’s momentum. Nothing suffocates an action sequence and alienates an audience faster than a close up in the midst of high speed chaos, especially on a handheld camera, and although the film is sometimes guilty of this too, never once during the Paris sequence is any of the action incomprehensible to the senses, gliding smoothly and rapidly by, always keeping focus and always melding the real and the computer generated together seamlessly.
Action Films Losing Their Authenticity
However, this critic personally yearns for the days of films like Die Hard and Terminator where stunts were performed by real people and looked, although maybe times marginally, like feats of real acrobatics.
As technology advances, not only is it being abused in order to make things seem “bigger” and “better” at the expense of coherence, but action films are losing their air of authenticity in exchange for a rapid succession of non-stop jolts to the senses, rendering them no more than live action video games with glimpses of real people from time to time.
G.I. Joe is guilty of this too, but it at least tries, if only mildly, to be engaging on a character based level so that one can at least become involved in the never ending barrage of noise and color. Because of this it’s the best big budget summer action film of 2009. That’s not high praise considering, but it’s better than nothing.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
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