4/5 Stars.
As a full-on action movie where you drink your Icee, eat your popcorn, watch stuff blow up, and have fun, it totally works. The writing is surprisingly good (although not very deep), and the acting is surprisingly better than expected. Good special effects, too.
As a G.I. Joe movie, it’s a bit disappointing. With the Star Trek movie, they had a good excuse for changing up the story. It’s easy to accept when you’re talking about time travel. With G.I. Joe, you have years of comics, cartoons, and toys that have laid down a story. Unfortunately, Hasbro chose to gear the movie more toward a new generation of sales instead of staying near the existing continuity.
The breakdown:
Pros:
- Breaker chewing gum = The best callback to existing continuity, especially for an owner of issues 1-91 of the Marvel comics (thank you, Larry Hama). Breaker was the closest to an existing character
- Scarlett was very well cast and written
- Snake Eyes kicked ass
- Storm Shadow was well cast
Cons:
- Scarlett was way too attracted to Ripcord and not enough to Snake Eyes
- Snake Eyes’ costume was a ridiculous mold
- The Arashakage backstory between Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow was rewritten for no reason, yet left slightly vague should they revisit it in a sequel. Zartan really killed the Hard Master, not Storm Shadow.
- Duke was a Sergeant, not a Captain (NCOs, generally, have a better rapport with enlisted men, which is why Duke is a good leader)
- G.I.Joe and MARS/Cobra were way too well-funded
- Ripcord should have been Stalker, but it would have left Duke as a loner. In that case, it would have made more sense to replace Duke with Falcon, but he came much later in the story, not at the “Rise of Cobra”. I’d much rather have seen him as Short-Fuze, Zap, Grunt, or Clutch.
So, yeah, I’m a G.I. Joe nerd and most of my complaints come from ditching the historical continuity. It was still a good movie, and I’ll probably buy it. If there is a sequel, I hope they do a little patchwork to incorporate more of Larry Hama’s characters (Stalker, Clutch) and the old cartoon (Shipwreck, Gung Ho).
