Film Review: G.I. Joe: Retaliation

 

It surely can’t come to pass that any film this summer blockbuster season will be more unintelligably dire than Jon M. Chu’s G.I. Joe: Retaliation. Jonathan Pryce’s character doesn’t even have a name. He’s just called ‘President’. Terrifyingly, this is only the beginning of a smorgasbord of cinematic excrement.

Plenty of people were looking forward to the blow-em-up sequel to 2009’s The Rise of Cobra. Why? Because it wasn’t all bad. It featured Channing Tatum and Joe Gordon-Levitt (both pre-megafame) as well as the dependable decency of Dennis Quaid, Sienna Miller and Christopher Eccleston. Sure, it was stupid. But it was so stupid (like, Expendables, stupid) that it retained a likeability factor. Where Retaliation goes immediately wrong is that it tries to mature with the audience (who by now are probably around 30-31) and try to take itself a little more seriously. In it’s vain attempt at being 10% more of a ‘serious’ movie, it descends into utter gutter trash.

Normally, Dwayne Johnson can be depended on to lift a film, but even he struggles here. Even with the introduction of Bruce Willis (easily the single best thing about the film), Retaliation is a massive pile of flatness for more than a few reasons.

Firstly, there are too many characters. Sure, when kids owned G.I. Joes, they had loads of them. Enough so that if your buddies came over you could have a little war. Fantastic. But there’s no rule that says if you’re going to adapt a toy line into a film, you have to include every character you could possibly cast. There are so many scenes with so many different characters that it becomes impossible keep track of. And then, one of the ninjas disguises themselves as one of the other ninjas, and then one of them changes allegiances. Not a clue.

Speaking of casting, just what the hell is RZA doing in this movie? Didn’t The Man With The Iron Fists‘ reception kill his career? The annoying thing is he’s not bad in some of his roles. Funny People, Due Date – amusing! Here though, my God. There have been accounts of people laughing in theatres every time he opened his mouth in the few scenes where he unfortunately features. He sounds like Marcellus Wallace swallowed a Hitori Hanzo sword. Truly dire.

Then there’s the ‘plot’. Apparently, Arnold Vosloo has disguised himself as the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES and no one has noticed. Oh wait, sorry, the Lady Joe did when she noticed that on some news footage when he clasps his hands together, his left thumb has been resting on top of his right thumb which he didn’t used to do, and wouldn’t do because it ‘just feels strange’. Also, he is using some different phrases when he talks. Please. You mean to say that up until this point, NO ONE has noticed that the man posing as ‘President’ is simply a criminal in disguise? Never mind his thumbs, the fact that he acts completely insane didn’t give anyone else other than Lady Joe a clue? Even more ridiculously, his Secret Service detail are wearing goddamn Cobra pins on their lapels rather than the ol’ Stars and Stripes. Again, not a blink. Understandably, this movie is for kids (sort of), but most people would probably find their own child’s intelligence insulted by Retaliation‘s incessant pap.

So, ‘President’ and not-Joe Gordon-Levitt (Cobra Commander) have developed this sweet load of satellite tungsten bomb things that orbit the earth (there’s something like seven of them, obviously no one bothered to question just what the hell they were doing). A nuclear summit is called where the world’s leaders are asked to lay down their country’s nuclear arms. They decline, so ‘President’ launches the entirety of the USA’s nuclear arsenal. Then (I’m struggling to even write it), the rest of the world’s leaders launch ALL of their nuclear weapons. Chaos! Madness! The USA aborts, then everyone else aborts and a sigh of relief is had (or a groan of boredom if you’re still paying attention by this point). Hooray, all the nukes are gone.

What follows is probably the most pleasing sequence, visually. The Cobra-team launch one of their metal space javelins at London and completely decimate it. It’s a tad sketchy on the VFX side of things, but funny to watch at least. As soon as it comes, it goes, and the audience is left with another pitiful half an hour to sit through. Some stuff happens, Bruce Willis says some funny jokes and reveals more guns in drawers and cupboards than Neo and Trinity had at their disposal before they went to save Morpheus. Then The Rock wears a small hat and proves once more that he has the best teeth in the business, and the movie ends.

Was it mentioned that Channing Tatum was actually in this film for the first 20 minutes or so? And that the whole reason Retaliation was pushed back six months was to include more of him after test audiences cried bloody murder when he was killed off so early? Earlier than 20 mins?! How much earlier can you get? Maybe he could’ve just not been in it at all and that would actually have been better (for all the Tatum fans out there, he was wasted in this). Whoever put him on posters for this tragedy should be arrested.

At least Dwayne Johnson still has Fast 6 coming out this summer. They might as well call that, G.I. Johnson: Redemption.