'GI Joe' Movie Review

Synopsis: Damaged arms merchants and scientists come together to save the world from itself...by taking it over. An elite team of soldiers tries to stop them from using their metal eating nanobot bombs from destroying major cities around the world.

As a kid, I wasn't really into GI Joe that much, being much more interested in giant robot wars than human wars. I had a familiarity with the property, mostly through the comics. When 'Transformers' did so well, it was no shock to me that this was fast tracked. I had little interest in seeing this movie because the trailers made it look stupid and derivative. Sometimes trailers lie to you. This is not one of those times.

There is some character development but only in the most predictable of ways. The gentleman playing Duke, one of the main characters, is a bland actor who is not very convincing at anything. There is TONS and TONS of horrible looking CGI in this film. It's distractingly bad CGI. Really, really bad CGI. The mouth on Snake Eyes looks creepy and weird. Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow fight briefly but you see nothing. There are flashbacks to when they are kids and the action there is filmed better than the 'big fight' at the end of the film. This ticks me off. Ray Park's in that suit just waiting to be all sorts of awesome and...nothing.

There are some bright moments. I liked the 'reinvention' of Cobra and Joe teams in a general sense, thinking that this was a good origin for our time period. I liked the silly weaponry. Christopher Eccleston was fun as always. Jonathan Pryce has a cameo as does Brendan Fraser. There are some intentionally funny bits that are funny. Scarlett and the Baroness are both very attractive. The movie moves along at a quick pace and doesn't slow down much at all.

The subtitle of the film is 'The Rise of Cobra' and it is that: the beginnings of this terrorist outfit so don't expect familiar characters to be in their expected configuration at the beginning of the film. Maybe not even by the end of the film.

My GI Joe loving buddy watched a bit and said he was trying to watch it as an action film with some familiar names in it, not as 'Joe'. From my more detached perspective, I still think it fails. It gets a lot of the subtle things right while missing out on some of the bigger things. There's a lot of running around and shouting in front of bad CGI. The entertaining bits aren't enough to balance out the bland standard action bits. It's just not a very good film. It's not bad enough to be entertainingly bad nor good enough to be good. It's just there.

Recommendation to avoid.