Review | 'G.I. Joe' is dumb, digital and derivative

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THIS IS NOT MY PERSONAL REVIEW
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By Roger Moore, The Orlando Sentinel
Summer blockbuster season officially ends with the arrival of “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” another brainless popcorn picture built on an awful '80s TV cartoon.

It's a Bush-era movie built on a Reagan-era cartoon — all exotic hardware and can-do commandos, endless violence with barely a drop of blood — the illusion of “surgical” warfare reduced to a video game.

It's dumb. It's digital. It's derivative. This “Joe,” scripted at a toy-selling TV-cartoon level, is a non-stop shoot-em-up edited to induce seizures. And if George Lucas doesn't sue over the blatant “Star Wars” rip-off finale, he's missing easy money.

Stone-faced dancer-boxer-tough-guy Channing Tatum stars as Duke, a soldier who loses a set of valuable missile warheads. An elite team headed by Gen. Hawk (Dennis Quaid) saves the nanomite (metal-eating micro-robots) bombs, and Duke and his pal Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) are impressed.

“When all else fails, we don't,” Gen. Hawk growls.

This team, with its super-secret base beneath the Egyptian desert, its super-secret jets, super-secret subs and super- secret “acceleration suits” borrowed from “Iron Man,” faces off against an evil Scottish arms supplier (Christopher Eccleston), the latest in a long line of “sell to both sides” villains, according to a prologue.

But the G.I. Joes — Scarlett (Rachel Nichols), Heavy Duty (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), Breaker (Said Taghamaoui) and the silent ninja Snakeyes (Ray Park in a rubber suit) — may lose their race to save Paris and any other city with metal infrastructure. The arms dealer has the white-suited ninja Storm Shadow (Byung Hun-Lee) slicing up everybody in sight. And in her skin-tight jumpsuit and stiletto heels, head henchwoman Ana (Sienna Miller) is taking no prisoners.

For all this Stephen “The Mummy” Sommers movie's infantile obsession with gadgets, here's something he gets right. Miller is a minx of a villain. All her time in the tabloids has given her a sexy, angry, bad-girl edge.

The rest? Action beats we've seen in a hundred other movies, from James Bond to “The Matrix,” and those movies set “in a galaxy far, far away.”

It's no dumber or emptier than “Transformers,” but “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” can't help but make one cringe when the bad guy says, as bad guys in bad scripts always say, “This has only just begun.”

| Rating: 1.5 stars out of four; running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes; Rated: PG-13 for strong sequences of action violence and mayhem
Review | 'G.I. Joe' is dumb, digital and derivative - Kansas City Star

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Review in a Hurry: This barely live-action adaptation of the mid-'80s toy/comic/cartoon iteration of Hasbro's long-running soldier toys is fast-paced, decently cast and, shall we say, "easy on the brain." Unfortunately, it's also frequently laugh-out-loud cheesy, and the digital effects are highly dubious.

The Bigger Picture: First things first: Yes, the rumors are true, and G.I. Joe is no longer an American team but an international one (the classic "real American hero" tagline is rendered a sarcastic toss-off). As for terrorist archfoes Cobra, they don't really rise until the very end of the movie, rather optimistically setting up a sequel.

Instead, the enemy here is James McCullen (Christopher Eccleston), who will eventually become the familiarly chrome-domed archvillain Destro, but for now is a Scottish arms dealer who sells weapons to NATO and then steals them back, in a scam any street hustler would figure out within seconds. He is aided in dastardly deeds by leather-clad baroness Ana (Sienna Miller), freshly laundered ninja Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee), perennially whistling Zartan (Arnold Vosloo) and a Darth Vader-like mad scientist (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) whose name and face remain mostly hidden in order to conceal a very obvious plot twist.

The scientist has created 20 supersoldiers to do McCullen's bidding, though that number seems to have inexplicably multiplied exponentially by the movie's climax. And don't get us started on that underwater base—cue Clerks-style jokes about building contractors on the Death Star.

Meanwhile, the Joe team brings in rookies Duke (Channing Tatum) and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) after the wisecracking twosome survive an attack by the forces of evil, and it just so happens that Duke recognizes Ana as his ex-fiancée who, naturally enough, has now dyed her hair jet black and donned glasses to indicate that she's turned to the dark side.

Then the bad guys try to blow up the Eiffel Tower, because McCullen's still pissed off that an ancestor of his was tortured by Frenchmen. Only after that does he aim for Moscow and Washington. And the Joe team has to stop him, via a bunch of crazy green-screen plus shaky-cam. This may be the first movie to boast digital effects that actually look less realistic than the graphics in its own tie-in video game.

The cast makes for mostly solid entertainment. Tatum's insanely fearless Duke, Rachel Nichols' icy sexpot Scarlett, Vosloo's hilariously casual Zartan and especially Lee's intensely angry ninja are highlights. Miller tries hard in her role but is saddled with the worst storyline of the bunch, plus a costume that's a big notch below some of the ones we've seen at Comic-Con (and by the way, the character's glasses are not optional, Stephen Sommers!). Best not to say too much about Dennis Quaid as Joe leader Gen. Hawk, barking out orders like your drunken uncle at a Thanksgiving dinner.

All that said, the cartoons were pretty dumb too, but we liked them as kids. This is certainly no worse.

The 180—a Second Opinion: That Paris chase scene with the accelerator suits, relied upon so heavily in the trailers, is a standout action sequence, and the only one in the film where the characters feel in real jeopardy, probably because it was shot on location and doesn't (entirely) depend on CG cartoons.Review: Say It Ain't So, G.I. Joe - E! Online
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Why didn't they make the movie like a Jason Bourne? I'm hoping that I can watch this and not the Julie & Julia. Maybe just maybe the wife will let me watch this while she watches the other one. Or better yet maybe she will take a girlfriend and let me stay home.

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Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily » FINALLY, A FILM FOR FLYOVER COUNTRY: ‘G.I. Joe’ Breaks August Record For $22.3M Friday/$60.3M Weekend; ‘Julie & Julia’ Cheaply Counter-Programs For $20M Wkd

SATURDAY AM UPDATE: With a big pricetag of $175 million, and bad buzz preceding it, G.I. Joe seemed certain to tank. For months, Paramount's claims that the movie worked fell on deaf ears. Not until the Stephen Sommers' directed pic came on tracking with incredibly high awareness among males (with scores in the 90s). Now, despite all the sniping and snarking, it's the biggest opener ever in August for a non-sequel, and the 3rd biggest August opener ever. It looks to debut for a $60.3M North American weekend after earning $22.3M today from a huge release into 4,007 theaters. The pic even made a " B+" CinemaScore ("A-" for under 18). This would be a great result if the film weren't so expensive. True, Spyglass Entertainment shared the cost, and I've learned everyone's deals were restructured so there was no first-dollar gross paid to anyone. But added to box office grosses will be other revenue streams. "This property will sell 100's of millions of dollars of Hasbro toys that we get a royalty in," a Paramount exec reminds me. "And given the action, this will be a huge seller on DVD."

G.I. Joe also opened day and date in 75% of its foreign territories. Although I've heard reports from rival studios that ticket sales were "disappointing" in Australia (where the pic opened #2 to the Sony romantic comedy Ugly Truth), early numbers from Spain and France as well as Asia and Latin America are said to be "very good". One projection for overseas grosses this weekend is $35M -- despite what is sure to be some Anti-American military sentiment in, say, parts of Europe. (Yes, U.S. military operatives are joined by international elite forces, and foreign actors were cast in major roles, and Paris and Egypt were some of the locales. But, c'mon, this movie is called G.I. Joe!)

In the U.S., the studio expects the film to do best in so-called flyover country -- with blue-collar moviegoers in the Midwest, South, and West where the common complaint is that liberal elite Hollywood doesn't make movies for their "God, guns, and country" tastes. Indeed, this pic's strength is that it doesn't suffer from any moral ambiguity: there are good guys, bad guys, and nothing inbetween. "With this domestic opening, and the early international results, the film should be on its way to $300 million worldwide," a Paramount exec predicted to me tonight.

By contrast, Sony Pictures' Julie & Julia had an almost exclusively female audience, a production cost of only $40M, a release into 2,975 venues, and massive free media coverage because of its subject matter -- American cooking icon Julia Child. "This was maybe the oldest audience I can remember: 55% of the moviegoers were over the age of 50," a rival studio exec tells me. The result was that Nora Ephron's foodie pic will make back half of its budget with its projected opening weekend. The Meryl Streep-Amy Adams starrer made a $7.5M debut today. Expect an adult bump on Saturday thanks to a Cinemascore of "A" (for both males and females: "A-" under 35, "A" over 35). With a good Sunday, the pic could get to low $20sM.

After that, no film looks to crack $10M -- not even last weekend's #1 Funny People, which dropped a massive -72% today to No. 5. The Universal dramedy from Judd Apatow starring Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen made just $2.4M for what's probably a $7.5M weekend and $40.1M cume. The studio must be sitting shiva.

Jerry Bruckheimer's first 3-D effort, G-Force, for Disney was 3rd with $2.8M for a predicted $8.5M weekend and cume of $84.8M. Warner Bros' Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince lost steam and came in #4 with $2.4M Friday and maybe an $8M weekend for a cume of $272.8M. Sony Pictures' Ugly Truth was #6 with $2.2M for perhaps a $7M and cume of $69.1M.

And, opening in just the 7th spot, Relativity's Rogue continues its losing streak of pics with Perfect Getaway, which opened to only $2M today for what should be no more than a $5.5M weekend. The movie was distributed by Universal into 2,159 dates. Whereas Fox Searchlight's 500 Days Of Summer expanded to 800 runs and did $1.3M today for No. 8 and a $4.2M weekend and $12.8M cume.

Overall, the weekend looks to finish with $135M, up at least 15% over last year.
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I went and seen the Ugly Truth last weekend so I get a pass on Julia & Julie. By the way Ugly Truth was so bad I went out in the lobby and played video games for a little while. I was suppose to be in the bathroom. There was a couple of other guys there with their wives and one was drinking beer like crazy. Ever now and then he would look over at me and shake his head. Yes I had a few beers too.

[BASURAACA]

Well, there was a time when USA used to make great movies, whatever the subject was.
I think the greed for money and censorship fucked that up.