G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009)

Forty-five years after they first entered the market, Hasbro’s line of G.I. Joe action figures is transformed into a monster, $170 million live-action movie by director Stephen Sommers (THE MUMMY). With nearly non-stop action unhindered by forgettable acting, bland production design and a simple, fast-moving plot drawn largely from writer Larry Hama’s “G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero” Marvel Comics series, the film is actually an entertaining two hours of intentionally juvenile escapism that stays true to its roots, unlike Sommers’ VAN HELSING or this summer’s other mega-blockbuster TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN. Just don’t go looking for anything other than rushed, action reel highlights of ninjitsu-trained adversaries, Snake Eyes (Ray Park) and Storm Shadow (Lee Byung-hun), battling one another in between CGI-enhanced battles involving power armor, gigantic subterranean lairs, aquatic dog fights, and future weapons.

In G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA, we have an origin story of sorts that clearly provides the basis for sequels by introducing lead characters and showing the simultaneous formation of rival paramilitary factions including Cobra, the evil doers bent on world domination and G.I. Joe, the “real multinational heroes” committed to stopping them.

With a plot fit for any tween children’s cartoon or comic book, a weapons manufacturer named McCullen (Christopher Eccleston) plots to spread panic and take over the world with a new nano-missile that eats metal by staging its theft and destroying Paris with it. Duke (Channing Tatum) and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) are two Special Forces operatives recruited into a secret international defense organization known as G.I. Joe by General Hawk (Dennis Quaid) just as the missiles are stolen by McCullen’s top agents, the black leather-clad Baroness (Sienna Miller) and the white-clad ninja Storm Shadow. Joined by the crossbow-wielding Scarlett (Rachael Nichols), the mute and masked ninja master Snake Eyes (Ray Park), tech specialist Breaker (Said Taghmaoui), and heavy weapons specialist Heavy Duty (Adewale Akinnouye-Agbaje), Duke and Ripcord struggle to save Paris before tracking down McCullen’s secret underwater base which is being used as a research facility by McCullen’s associate The Doctor (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to use the same nano technology to create an army of mind-controlled super soldiers.

While a brainless actioner based on toys for pre-teens, the fact that multiple generations of young boys have grown up with the toys and related comics and cartoons, means that the film has to answer to a large base of adult fans who are familiar with the toys’ history.

Some controversy has surrounded the film in the lead up to release that relates to the decision to ditch what G.I. Joe was originally designed to represent, the United States armed forces. The term “G.I. Joe” originated as an informal term in World War II to describe the ordinary infantryman, or “General Issue Joe,” with Joe being considered a common name at the time.

In 1945, shortly before the war ended, United Artists released the war drama G.I. JOE, starring Burgess Meredith as real-life war correspondent Ernie Pyle, the man largely responsible for making the term popular through his writing. Pyle died two months before the release of the film from enemy gunfire while covering the war in the Pacific. I mention this because the term “G.I. Joe” still means something other than a child’s play fantasy or the latest Hollywood cash-in.

Flash forward to 1964. Hasbro, a 40-year-old toy company responsible for giving us Mr. Potatohead decides to counter Mattel’s creation of Barbie with a doll for boys. They originally concocted three 12-inch tall dolls representing the U.S. Marines, Navy and Air Force. Wisely marketed at action figures, G.I. Joe was born. Yet it only took a few years amid the rising unpopularity of the Vietnam War to cause Hasbro to distance their toy line from its military origins and re-cast the expanding G.I Joe line as a generic adventure team. In the late 1970s, as the famous rubber “kung fu grip” hands were introduced, G.I. Joe began to develop into a team of heroes fighting space aliens, yes, space aliens.

Where the toy line begins to resemble the 2009 movie is in 1982 with a relaunch of the G.I. Joe brand, with the sub-heading of “A Real American Hero.” In a brilliant marketing move, Hasbro teamed up with Marvel to produce a new line of scaled down action figures tied to a comic book series. This is where Joe’s enemies, Cobra, and the film’s prominent characters including General Hawk (Dennis Quaid), Duke (Channing Tatum), Ripcord (Marlon Wayans), Scarlett (Rachael Nichols), Snake Eyes, Destro (Christopher Eccleston), the Baroness (Sienna Miller), and Storm Shadow originate.

Any boy growing up in America with access to a TV in the 1980s who didn’t read the comics probably at least saw Hasbro’s original cartoon series which ran for two seasons beginning in 1985. The animated series took Larry Hama’s comic series as its basis and tweaked it here and there for an expectantly younger audience, most notably by removing any suggestion of death or killing. This led to an endless stream of improbable and convenient last-minute rescues and kept any characters from being written out. G.I. Joe in animated form peaked with the release of director Don Jurwich’s enjoyable feature film G.I. JOE: THE MOVIE in 1987.

Looking at THE RISE OF COBRA, G.I. Joe would seem to have matured on the surface. The Joe’s have color-coordinated uniforms with built in body armor. As ridiculous as the idea of a nano-missile that eats metal may seem today, it’s far more plausible than most of Cobra’s half-baked schemes to rule the world. Anyone remember the plan to create dinosaurs or how about when Cobra had Zartan and the Dreadnoks form a rock band to send subliminal mind-control messages to their fans? The action in the movie is also far more violent than it ever was in the cartoon. People actually die, or at least we never see them ejecting safely from exploding vehicles.

The film is violent enough to warrant its PG-13 rating as the death count is fairly high and there is quite a bit of maiming going on. It could also be argued that putting Sienna Miller in tight leather is steering the film into promiscuous territory even though the few sexual references in the film are very mild and the Baroness dressed similarly in the cartoon and comics.

A sizable portion of the movie is devoted to Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, easily two of the most popular characters in the Joe universe. Who doesn’t like ninjas, right? Wushu-trained actor Ray Park, best known for playing Darth Maul in STAR WARS: EPISODE I – THE PHANTOM MENACE, is the silent and mysterious Snakes Eyes, the guy every geeky kid I knew in grade school wanted to be back in 1985, myself included. The only beef I have with how this character was portrayed was in the decision to give his mask facial features, including a molded mouth. It’s like we just went back to 1997 and Joel Schumacher’s BATMAN & ROBIN with the nipples molded onto the heroes’ chest armor. It just isn’t necessary.

Snake Eyes gets into several skirmishes with his nemesis, Storm Shadow, who is played by Korean actor Lee Byung-hun (I COME WITH THE RAIN). Unlike Park, Lee gets to show his face, show his sculpted bare torso and speak a few lines. Due to the hectic nature of how his fight scenes were shot I can’t speak for his fighting ability but he’s dripping with natural charisma and makes leading men Channing Tatum and Marlon Wayans look less manly than they’re pretending to be. I saw a comment on IMDB.com that compared Lee in his white casual suit to David Chiang in VENGEANCE. It’s absolutely true. As always, filmmaker Chang Cheh was way ahead of his time.

The fight choreography is solid. The directing and editing of the fights are not. There are too many quick cuts and not enough wide shots or dramatic moments. Park is a skilled screen fighter and I’ll credit George Lucas with giving him a better showcase in THE PHANTOM MENACE. That said, Park could have been replaced by any decent stunt actor with similar training and we would never know the difference. In that sense Park is overrated, although he’s ideally suited for this role because of his soft-spoken voice and meager acting abilities.

An interesting aspect of the Snake Eyes vs. Storm Shadow sub-plot is a series of flashbacks revealing the characters’ shared childhood where they trained together under a ninjitsu master played by Gerald Okamura. There is almost more fighting going on between the two child actors portraying these characters than their adult counterparts and it looks just as good, if not better.

The young Snake Eyes is portrayed by Leo Howard. He’s only 12 but already has seven years of karate training behind him and looks like a natural on film. Howard is well matched onscreen in the young Storm Shadow role by 13-year-old actor Brandon Soo Hoo, a five-year veteran of Taekwondo with additional experience in extreme martial arts, Wing Chun and weapons handling. I wouldn’t be surprised to see both of these kids go on to become action stars.

A lot of the action sequences turned out to better than I had anticipated based on the trailers. As example, there is a chase sequence in the middle of the film as the Joe’s race through the streets of Paris to stop the Baroness and Storm Shadow from firing a nano-missile. It turns out the trailer shows the worst part of this sequence, the cheap, slow-mo money shot of Duke and Ripcord dodging missiles in their power armor. The rest of the sequence is actually quite fun, even though it’s still obvious that CG is being used to fake a lot of the stunts.

Stepping back to take the whole movie in, I have to be honest. As a critic I want to shred it to pieces for being yet another dumb, CGI-filled actioner that panders to the broadest, least-demanding audience possible with bad acting, bad scripting, excessive explosions, “pew pew” gunfire, and slow-motion money shots. So much of what happens in this movie goes beyond common sense or natural laws that it’s not even worth breaking down. After enduring VAN HELSING, a film I still consider to be one of the worst big-budget action movies of all time, I felt certain that Stephen Sommers was going to ruin this movie. But then I watched it with an open mind and realized that his brand of juvenile, physics-bending action is well suited for the G.I. Joe universe. We got essentially a two-hour, live-action cartoon that lives up to Hasbro’s standards for marketing their toys. G.I. JOE achieved what it set out to be and in that regard Paramount was wise in snubbing critics by releasing the film without advance screenings. Since Stephen Sommers is not contractually tied to this franchise there is also the potential for a better director to improve upon this rough foundation with a sequel. One of the strengths of the G.I. Joe universe is that it contains lots of characters to play with, most of whom were not present in this film, lots of gadgets and vehicles and near-limitless opportunities for generating action-based stories that can be as outlandish and goofy as the writers want it to be.

It might be a challenge given Snake Eyes’ muteness but I would like to see a spin-off martial arts movie focused on Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow. Unless you count historical characters like Yagyu Jubei or Hattori Hanzo, there are few well known ninja-fighting heroes. Then again, there is ELEKTRA and we know how well that DAREDEVIL spin-off turned out.