Any self-respecting child of the 80's who had the misfortune
to catch G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra,
couldn't help but leave the theater with a foul taste in their mouth.
Paramount's clumsy attempt at turning Hasbro's famed toy line into a
live-action franchise played fast and loose with the mythology as it careened
through a nonsensical plot riddled with idiotic dialogue. Rise of Cobra earned a little over $300 million worldwide, just
barely turning a profit on its exorbitant $175 million budget. It was still
enough to greenlight a sequel with the studio taking much of the criticism to
heart. G.I. Joe: Retaliation serves
as not only a sequel, but something of a reboot and catch-all apologia.
This time around, the Joe team consists of Duke (Channing
Tatum), Roadblock (Dwayne Johnson), Flint (D.J. Cotrona), and Lady Jaye
(Adrianne Palicki). After retrieving a nuclear warhead stolen from Pakistan,
the Joes are the victim of an airstrike that kills the majority of the team,
including Duke. The attack was ordered by the President (Jonathan Pryce), who
is actually Zartan (Arnold Vosloo) in disguise. Zartan proceeds to turn the
country against the Joes and orchestrates the escape of Cobra Commander from a
high-tech underground prison with the help of Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee) and
Cobra saboteur Firefly (Ray Stevenson). With the enemy now in the White House,
Roadblock, Flint, and Lady Jaye seek the aid of the original Joe, General Joe
Colton (Bruce Willis) to expose Cobra's Machiavellian plot. Meanwhile,
Snake-Eyes (Ray Park) and his protégé Jinx (Elodie Yung) are dispatched to the
Himalayas to hunt down Storm Shadow for the murder of their master.
Stephen Sommers and his brand of bland blockbuster
filmmaking are gone. In his stead, Paramount has gone for an improbable choice
in Jon M. Chu whose previous credits include Step Up 2: The Streets, Step
Up 3D and Justin Bieber: Never Say
Never as well as the Microsoft Surface commercials. His experience with
directing elaborately choreographed sequences serve Chu well when it comes to Retaliation's numerous action scenes. By
far, the best set piece where Snake-Eyes and Jinx clash swords with a cadre of
red ninjas while swinging around snow-capped mountainsides. It feels like an
entirely separate film within the film. Most of the other scenes involving
shootouts or fistfights suffer from hyperactive camerawork. The Himalayan
sequence is also the only section that benefits of the 3D post-conversion that
shelved the picture from its original release date in August 2012. Despite
rampant rumor mongering, Retaliation
did not go through any extensive reshoots.
Another aspect Chu brings is a genuine love of the property
to the point he used action figures to storyboard the action. The screenplay by
Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (Zombieland
and unproduced scripts for Deadpool
and Venom) inject the sequel with
more humor and faithfulness than its predecessor. The story skews much closer
to the Marvel comics by Larry Hama, including an homage to the iconic
"Silent Interlude" in issue #21. The Joes are more grounded as a Special
Forces branch of the military rather than the cartoonish global peacekeeping
force from Rise of Cobra. The
vehicles in the film resemble the toys you might have collected, such as the
HISS Tank, the AWE Striker, and the Water Moccasin. Cobra Commander has ditched
the god-awful plastic mask for his classic chrome faceplate. Roadblock being a
former chef and a hint of romance between Flint and Lady Jaye are thrown in for
the die-hard fans.
While the story gains in reverence to the source material,
it completely lacks in substance and coherence. The plot unfurls at lightning
speed through the 90 minute runtime with no gravitas to any of the film's major
moments. The convoluted backstory between Storm Shadow and Snake-Eyes is
shoehorned into the standard Cobra threatens to blow up the world scheme. The
entire city of London is destroyed with little bearing because we are ripped
away to the next scene. At one point, Storm Shadow is imprisoned and the guards
bafflingly bring along his swords, then leave them right out in the open. Nearly
everyone from Rise of Cobra has been
ditched with no mention at all to their fates. They aren't missed with the
exception of Rachel Nichols as Scarlett. However, her role is supplanted by
Adrianne Palicki's Lady Jaye though there is little done to differentiate the
two. Developing fully dimensional characters is hardly a priority. It's clear a lot of that stuff was cut out during the hiatus.
Only Roadblock makes an impression thanks to the charisma of
Dwayne Johnson, who has become the go-to guy to resurrect flailing franchises. Besides
already looking like an action figure brought to life, Johnson has an easygoing
charm that meshes well with the surprisingly funny Channing Tatum. The repartee
between Roadblock and Duke are some of the most entertaining in the movie,
which suffers following Tatum's departure. However, you can't blame Tatum for
wanting to move on to bigger and better things now that he's starring in Steven
Soderbergh productions. Jonathan Pryce, one of the few actors to return, gets a
much meatier role with a dual performance as the disheveled president and the villainous Zartan. Pryce is clearly relishing the
deliciously evil one-liners given to him ("They
call it waterboarding, but I never get bored."). The same goes for Ray
Stevenson and Walt Goggins as a somewhat sadistic warden. Don't expect to see
the lively Bruce Willis seen in Moonrise Kingdom
or Looper. As Gen. Colton, Willis can
hardly muster up an emotion aside from mild bemusement. RZA wins the award for
worst performance due to his wooden turn as the Blind Master.
Paramount still doesn't hit the mark the second time around. G.I. Joe: Retaliation won't be mistaken
for high art, but the sequel accomplishes its modest goal of being mindless
entertainment.
Rating: ** (*****)
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