Movie Review Corner: GI Joe The Rise of Cobra

[Phoenix]

Title: GI Joe The Rise of Cobra
Genre: Action
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Synopsis:
Armed with the latest in military and spy technology, the team of elite soldiers known as G.I. Joe travel around the globe to wherever their services are needed. In their latest assignment Gen. Hawk (Dennis Quaid), Duke (Channing Tatum) and the rest of the G.I. Joe team take on Destro (Christopher Eccleston), a corrupt arms dealer, and fight the growing threat of the mysterious Cobra organization.
Ok, I grew up in the 80s watching Transformers, GI Joe, Smurfs, He-Man, and so forth. I loved the cartoons and all their silliness. The Transformers' movies have been... disheartening.  GI Joe... not as disheartening and more enjoyable. That said, it's still not that great.

My main complaint lies with the Joes themselves. I really didn't care for the characters of Duke, Scarlett, Ripcord, Hawk, and others I can't remember. Though I will say... Snake Eyes' face mask really bothered me. Why did he have to have the mouth molded??? It made it look beyond creepy and was visibly annoying. And where were Flint, Lady Jay, and Shipwreck? Brendan Frasier made a small cameo, and he would have made a good Flint. But sadly, he was some random character named Sgt Stone. Only thing I'm glad didn't happen, was that Sgt Slaughter made no appearance.

Now, the villians, Cobra, they were good. Now, I was worried Sienna Miller's take on the Baroness wouldn't be worth squat. Well, she wasn't too bad actually. Didn't care much for her backstory with Duke, however. Arnold Vosloo played Zartan and he did a wonderful job at it. But the main villian was Destro, played fantastically by Christopher Eccleston. Now, I love Eccleston for one reason... he was the 9th Doctor. And I kept wanting to hear him say "Fantastic!". I wanted that fan-girl giggle. But he did do a great job as Destro. I did also enjoy his backstory, well, his family's backstory. Quite interesting.

The effects were good, just as good as all other Stephen Sommers movies such as The Mummy. The script was lacking, and needed their writers to watch just a bit of the TV series to get the characters down a little better.

All in all, I was glad this movie was in Stephen Sommers' hands and not Michael Bay's. This is definitely something to watch on the big screen as a popcorn action flick. Just make sure to leave your mind at the door.

  Could have been so much better

[Gobbledygook]

What did you guys think about the GI: JOE film?

I just saw it recently, and though it doesn't follow the original cartoon too much it was still very entertaining in a cleche sorta way. lol.  I guess with GI:Joe they can kind of do whatever they want with that franchise especially since it originated from a toy franchise simply based on U.S. military soldiers.  It wasn't until the 80's that they threw in Cobra and snake eyes and all that. 

Edit: This topic had already been started, so the two topics were merged. ~Raph