"G.I. Joe" - REVIEW

I admire Hollywood for constantly trying to outdo itself, but couldn't they, just for once, try to outdo themselves in a good way? It was bad enough this summer with "Wolverine" landing with a thud (although I didn't think it was a trainwreck, many did), and then the insufferable, unavoidable juggernaut known as "Transformers 2" rolled into theaters, pummeling our senses and begging us to shut off our brains completely. But that was May/June. Those two months, along with early July, are when the biggest, loudest, most obnoxious blockbusters roll out. August is where things finally start to cool off. Well, not this year.

The second film developed from a line of dolls (sorry, "action figures") is Paramount's "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra" based on the hugely popular military commando action figures/cartoon series that reached its peak somewhere in the early/mid 90s. Only this time, instead of bringing in explosion-master Michael Bay, we get Stephen Sommers, the visionary behind "The Mummy" and "Van Helsing". Yeeeeeeeeeeeeah. Now, after countless lame trailers and TV ads, the last easily identifiable blockbuster has arrived, and it's another dud. But it's a different kind of dud. A very special dud. See, as flawed as "Wolverine" and "Transformers" were, they did have some merit: "Wolverine"'s cast and director were trying hard but stuck with a blah script and hyper-active editing and bad studio management, while "Transformers" had amazing special effects on an epic scale, and looked surprisingly polished. "G.I. Joe" lacks all of this, and it's clear from the start. There's no point bothering with the plot, because there's barely one in the first place, though the film does yammer about some special apocalyptic warheads made by some Scottish guy played by Christopher Eccleston...who...I guess really needed a paycheck.

Regardless, the problems are evident right off the bat. The writing is lazy, the stunts poorly staged and choreographed, and worst of all, the CGI is completely laughable. This film cost $175 million, and yet all of the scampering aliens of the $30 million "District 9" (reviewed in the post above) all look 20 times better. Everything in "Joe" looks like it was ripped straight out of a cartoon, and the flaccid performances and limp attempts at humor, as inoffensive as they are, only make things worse. At the center of it all are Duke (Channing Tatum, making one expression) and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans...God help us all), ordinary soldiers who get swept up into the mysterious Joe crowd after being ambushed by The Baroness (Sienna Miller) and a bunch of goons. Turns out, Duke and Baroness used to have a past, which we're told about via fleeting flashbacks. Actually...this movie has a LOT of those. Almost everyone has somesort of flashback at some point, most irritatingly rival ninjas Stormshadow and Snake Eyes, who get about 5, despite being definitive supporting characters. And that's where it all starts to get annoying. Apparently studios seem to think that because a film is based off of a toy or video game, it somehow has permission to be unfathomably bad because "it's from a kids show". Frankly I'm sick of this logic, and hopefully after this summer at the movies, most audiences are as well. Thankfully it doesn't drag, although it doesn't have the ludicrous energy that "Transformers" had, despite being considerably shorter.

So in the end, how bad is Sommers' latest summer offering? Pretty bad. It's story is weak, performances non-existant (although somehow not embarrassing either), and worst of all, its visuals look cheesy despite the enormous budget. Unfortunately, a sequel, which the film was practically begging for during its last 20 minutes, has already been greenlit, so it's doubtful that Hollywood will be learning from its mistakes anytime soon.

P.S. What the hell was Joseph Gordon-Levitt doing in this movie? Was he that desperate for big money? Good lord, the whole world's gone mad!

Grade: C-

Has Stephen Sommers been secretly FIRED from G.I. Joe?

Source: Slashfilm.com

A number of sites today are pushing forward the story that G.I. Joe director Stephen Sommers has been locked out of the film’s editing room, based on a post from film producer Don Murphy’s message board (now removed), as noticed by Latino Review. The story is picking up steam, in part thanks to vaguely corroborative posts by people like Jeff Wells. And while I can’t verify the story, I have heard several really bad things about the film from a few informed sources. Common word is that it is a disaster for Paramount, and that a lot of unplanned post-production work was done to amp up the action and excitement factors and possibly just to make the thing watchable. Details of the original post from Murphy’s message board after the jump.

The condensed version goes like this: A disastrous test screening led production exec Brad Weston to push for Sommers’ firing. Stuart Baird was brought in to rework the edit, while producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura was also let go from the project. (di Bonaventura getting the boot seems unlikely.) There’s a lot of talk in the post about how di Bonaventura and Sommers didn’t know anything about ‘the mythology’ and how that led (somehow) to the ruin of the film. The ‘didn’t know the mythology’ argument seems like a fanboy straw man as the issue doesn’t seem to be that themovie is bad by GI Joe standards, but by any standard. Jeff Wells quotes an unnamed source that says Sommers “was given total freedom but he melted down and has made the biggest bomb in many a moon.” Again, not a bad GI Joe movie, but a bad movie, period.

If Paramount had a solid action movie on their hands that wasn’t going to please the franchise’s core base, the studio could still do fine marketing it to the mass audience that doesn’t really care, as long as things are blowing up and Sienna Miller is wearing leather. Meanwhile, I have zero concern over the film one way or the other. Despite a basket full of bad efforts, I’m still willing to hope, no matter how unlikely it seems, that the Stephen Sommers of Deep Rising will show himself once again. And there’s always Joseph Gordon-Levitt to anticipate as Cobra Commander, dumb mask and all.

Update: Refutation or damage control? Latino Review spoke to Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who had this to say:

…it’s completely untrue he was never asked to leave or been fired or any of that. That’s ridiculous. The movie tested very well…We had three test screenings, three different times and tested it and each time it just got better and better. We started off in a good place and we ended up in even in a better place, which is what you hope on a film from testing it.

And on what happened in the editing room:

Nothing that doesn’t happen on every other movie, which is that you constantly work and work and work and you make it better and better. We had a delay on visual effects so we waited a long time to finish the movie but that’s the only thing. I don’t really know why that would be interpreting it negatively but I guess it was.

New TV spot for "G.I. Joe"

I'm calling it now: this movie is going to be the "surprise" big-budget flop of summer 2009. I mean, the effects are either too cartoony or clumsy, and honestly, hasn't the Eiffel Tower been wiped out in enough movies already? They couldn't have picked another iconic structure to destroy to build their marketing campaign around?

New, not terribly impressive, "GI Joe" clip

Movie Trailers - Movies Blog

International trailer for "GI Joe"