Main cast: Channing Tatum (Duke), Sienna Miller (Ana Lewis/The Baroness), Marlon Wayans (Ripcord), Rachel Nichols (Shana ‘Scarlett’ O’Hara), Saïd Taghmaoui (Breaker), Arnold Vosloo (Zartan), Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Heavy Duty), Christopher Eccleston (James McCullen), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (The Doctor), Lee Byung-hun (Storm Shadow), Ray Park (Snake Eyes), Jonathan Pryce (President), and Dennis Quaid (General Hawk)
Director: Stephen Sommers
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is a truly frightening movie. There is very little about this movie that has anything to do with the cartoon series that ran in the 1980s. This isn’t so bad if this movie didn’t make even the worst episodes of the cartoon series seem like masterpieces in comparison.
Okay, so we have MARS, an evil company that manufactures weapons of mass destruction. Its boss, James McCullen, has used NATO funding to create five nanomite missiles that can “eat” up metal and anything else within seconds. Of course, when the USA is buying these missiles, it’s okay, because we all know USA is the good guy here. But McCullen is evil – he plots to seize the missiles for himself to wreck havoc all over the world. So he sends his henchwoman the Baroness to retrieve them.
Among the US soldiers charged to protect the delivery of the missiles to the good guys are Duke and Ripcord. I think their real names are Mario and Bogart. Duke realizes that the Baroness is Ana, his ex-fiancée, so manly angst ensues, not that you can see any because I think Channing Tatum is incapable of displaying more than one facial expression in this movie. Alas, the G.I. Joe team of Scarlett, Snake Eyes, and Breaker show up to save these two. Now Duke and Ripcord want in too. They want to kick some ass!
I am going to list down the reasons why this movie is crap in point form because I do not want to waste any time and effort on this putrid stink pile of a movie. Ready?
- Duke. Whose idea is it to cast someone with all the acting ability of a mouth-breathing hobo to play a tall, blond, and charismatic character? Duke here comes off like a brain-damaged moron.
- The same moron who cast Channing Tatum must be responsible for casting the horribly out of place Marlon Wayans as Ripcord, Duke’s bromance partner. Mr Wayans plays the embarrassing cliché of the black guy who can’t shut up with the wisecracks, and it is really too bad that nobody tries to rip out the vocal cord (haw, haw) of Ripcord in this voice.
- The script turns the Baroness into a sappy victim of evil, thus robbing this character of much of her former glorious evil brand of diva fabulousness. Sienna Miller plays this character without much of the dominatrix vibes of the original character.
- Scarlett is introduced in this movie in a kick-ass way. But her role is soon reduced to being the valet of Duke and Ripcord and Ripcord’s bimbo love interest. It’s amazing how she and Heavy Duty, more senior members of G.I. Joe, are forced to remain in the backseat while upstarts Duke and Ripcord get to do all the dirty stuff here.
- The bad guys are not only so much cooler than the G.I. Joes, they are much more sympathetic too. Ana became the Baroness because Duke failed to protect her brother in the war like he promised and Duke subsequently abandoned her to her own misery. Remember, Duke is a brain-damaged mouth-breathing hateful hobo. Likewise, the infinitely cooler Storm Shadow is the way he is because his Master was a pathetic and biased Anglophile who clearly preferred the white brat over him. Who wouldn’t snap in his shoes?
- This movie is Team America: World Police without the irony. In trying to save the Eiffel Tower, the G.I. Joes (read: mouth-breathing brain damaged hobo and blabbermouth black sidekick cliché) pretty much destroyed the entire city of Paris. Way to go in saving the world in the American way! Woo-hoo!
- Not only that, we can’t overlook the insulting “it’s okay if the USA has weapons of mass destruction, but when someone else has them, then that person is evil and must be killed” theme of this soiled toilet paper of a movie.
- The whole movie is almost two hours long. Imagine being subjected to such insulting drivel being driven home by a horrible Cro-Magnon lead character and his trashy racial stereotype of a sidekick for two hours.
Okay, my mother always said that one should try to balance the good with the bad. Let me try to think of the good things in this movie.
Hmm.
Okay, there is some nice fanservice from the leading ladies who look good in their body suits, if you like that kind of thing. The mouth-breathing hobo, the blabbermouth, and the sexy Lee Byung-Hun show some ripped torso. But all that nice eye candy can’t make up for the infantile and insulting crappiness of this movie. The people responsible for the putrid script and the absolutely fail-worthy casting of the two wretched main characters should be tarred and feathered and run out of town for subjecting me to this vomitous two-hour braindead crap.
