Director: Stephen Sommers
Starring: Channing Tatum, Marlon Wayans & Sienna Miller
An unimpressive summer blockbuster featuring lacklustre acting, action, effects and storyline. G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra lacks fun and originality.
Capitalising on the success of another film franchise based on a popular children’s toy line and cartoon Transformers, G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra, based on the 1980s series (known in the UK as Action Man) comes to cinemas. The result however, feels rushed and like a haphazardly assembled sequence of set pieces inspired by other, more memorable, films and with a script and characters that seems to embrace cliché.
While transporting a newly developed weapon to a secure facility, two soldiers Duke (Tatum) and Ripcord (Wayans) find themselves the only survivors of an attack by a terrorist group known as Cobra whose attempt to steal the weapon is prevented by the arrival of an elite, an secret, US military unit called G.I. Joe. With the leader of the Cobra attack, the Baroness (Miller), known to Duke from his past, he and Ripcord find themselves inducted into the G.I. Joe unit as they seek to prevent the weapon from being used on the general public when a later assault on G.I. Joe headquarters sees the weapon stolen at last.
With a very thin plot revolving around the prevention of a weapon falling into enemy hands and the subsequent attempts to retrieve the weapon and prevent its usage when the first mission fails (essentially a follow-the-MacGuffin storyline). G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra swiftly moves from over the top and CGI-packed action sequence to the next with little pause for character or plot development. Were the action sequences and effects being better rendered and the characters more fleshed out then this could be perfectly acceptable and enjoyable for a summer blockbuster however, G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra fails to impress in any of these areas. The action sequences themselves all seem inspired by sequences from other films: a battle in the streets of Paris particularly fails to impress as such a sequence has not only been portrayed on screen before but took the form of a parody of action-blockbusters fives years before the release of this film in the comedy Team America in 2004. G.I. Joe’s final set piece, an attack on Cobra’s underwater base is an OTT, CGI-heavy rehashing of The Spy Who Loved Me. The CGI effects in these sequences are also unimpressive with the Paris sequence featuring Duke and Ripcord running through the streets in enhanced armoured suits in a manner that looks like a video game. With the characters also mostly underdeveloped (outside of Duke and Shake Eyes, most members of the unit get little more than a line of dialogue about their pasts and some don’t even get that) G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra does little to make you really care about many of its characters and therefore there is little sense of danger.
G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra also disappoints in terms of the performances of its cast. Despite featuring some noteworthy names in its cast such as Dennis Quaid as General Hawk, Christopher Eccleston as the villain McCullen and actors such as Said Taghmaoui, Adewale Akinnouye-Agbaje and Jonathan Pryce they are mostly relegated to fulfilling one-dimensional stereotypes of tough soldiers or evil villains as more screen time is given to less impressive actors. Channing Tatum is satisfactory as the main character of Duke though his character and performance is unmemorable, Marlon Wayans is slightly more enjoyable in the role of Ripcord who gets to add some comic relief to an otherwise too-straight film and Sienna Miller as the villainess The Baroness merely gets to stand around looking attractive rather than giving any impression that she’s an actual threat with her personality undermined by the likeability of Rachel Nichols in the film’s only other notable female role of the G.I. Joe Scarlett. None of the performances in G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra are particularly memorable.
Overall, G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra is a poorly assembled blockbuster film that fails to impress with its story, its performances, its action or its effects. There may some enjoyment for those who are devotees of the cartoon and toys from which the film is based but otherwise this film is a disappointment.
Rating: 1/5
