G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA (2009)

G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA (2009)

Tagline:  When all else fails, they don't

(Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi) [PG-13]

This belongs to an ancestor of mine. He was caught selling arms to both sides. The French forced him to wear it for the rest of his life. They called him Destro, destroyer of nations.

In this one, Duke (played by Channing Tatum) and Ripcord (played by Marlon Wayans) are part of a military group in charge of getting nanomite warheads created by a company called MARS to a certain location. They are attacked by another group with far superior weapons and end up getting a beat down. They are however rescued by G.I. JOE, yet another military group made up of the world’s elite fighters. We later find out that the group that attacked them is called COBRA. It turns out the leader of MARS, "McCullen" (played by Christopher Eccleston most famous for being DOCTOR WHO) has designs on taking over the world alongside COBRA. He’s got some competition from a mad scientist within COBRA named “The Doctor” (talk about irony), who is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Can Duke and Ripcord enter the world of G.I. JOE and help them overcome COBRA before COBRA’s nanomite warheads can be utilized to take over the world. 

First off I really liked the casting in this movie. While I am not a huge fan of Channing Tatum, he’s fine in this as Duke. Marlon Wayans is great as Ripcord. I loved that they got Dennis Quaid (famous for INNERSPACE) for General Hawk. Sienna Miller was perfect as the Baroness, if you are not familiar with the G.I. JOE toys, comics, or TV show, she’s one of the main characters throughout. Rachel Nichols (best known for the TV show Continuum) is great as Scarlett. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje is freaking fantastic in this as Heavy Duty. He’s probably best known for SUICIDE SQUAD as Croc but was also in THOR: THE DARK WORLD and a bunch of other big movies. You get the picture, it’s extremely well cast for the most part. I will say that I would never have picked Joesph Gordon-Levitt for Rex, it just feels like he was a bit too young for the role. 

The Good – Where this movie succeeds is in developing the backstories of the main character. Duke and Baroness are very well developed. The characters are all larger than life and this was a stellar effort to get the G.I. JOE franchise onto the big screen, in a lot of ways, even down to the incredible war machine designs, to the chase scenes, stunts, and weapon ideas. I also gotta give them props for crashing more cars than any other movie that had come out before it. I didn’t go into this movie expecting anything less than over the top carnage. This was directed by Stephen Sommers who did the first 2 MUMMY movies, so the action and scale are very impressive. 

The Rough – I am pretty sure that in the early 90’s we were getting better CGI than we see in this movie. This thing came out in 2009 and as cool as the designs are, some of the execution given that this is a big-budget film is really rough, even B-Movie rough. I also found that the dialog was uneven. As this film moves along the conversations and flow seem to get smoother, but the opening 30 minutes or so comes across as super tacky even if grew up with tacky stuff like I did. I do wish they had taken a more serious tone with the dialog, not to eliminate humor but to clean up some of the attempts to cram grandiose statements into scenes where the action, etc. would have been fine without it.

In the final analysis, this movie is a load of fun and really did what it needed to in order to bring the G.I. JOE universe to the big screen. Sadly the same cannot be said for the second installment. I give G.I. JOE: RISE OF THE COBRA a 5 out of 7. A few changes to this thing could have put this at a 6 or 7. 

GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF PARAMOUNT PICTURES AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY. 

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