Monday, Aug. 10, 2009

'G.I. Joe' combats adolescent script with adult violence

By Edward Robertson, atomictown.com

Even as a kid, I thought it was pretty ridiculous how no one ever died in a G.I. Joe battle.

Scores of soldiers on both sides, missiles flying this way and that, tanks and helicopters exploding like steel-plated popcorn, and it's nothing but soldiers parachuting to an injury-free landing. You have to wonder how evil COBRA can really be when they place that much emphasis on personal safety.

-- Trailer, times, theaters.

Maybe it says something about me that I desperately wanted amputations and flag-draped funeral services at 8 years old, but the drama is much less life and death when there's no death involved. I would hardly call G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra a grownup movie — not to say it doesn't try — but at least on the violence front it's aiming for more mature tastes.

Arms dealer Christopher Eccleston has just sold NATO his latest invention, nanomite warheads that can destroy everything metal in an entire city. Soldiers Channing Tatum and Marlon Wayans are entrusted to deliver the warheads, and en route their caravan is attacked by a squad of near-invincible soldiers with advanced weapons.

Before the attackers can make off with the warheads, the classified G.I. Joe squad shows up to drive them off. Tatum and Wayans join up with the Joes to keep the warheads safe — but Eccleston is the one trying to steal them back, and if he gets his hands on them, he'll throw the world into chaos.

Here's my impression of how that plays out in practice: boom kablam ack-ack-ack erk dead double-boom!! G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra basically exactly replicates how violent it was to play with the toys, only instead of whacking plastic dolls together while making machine-gun noises it's there on a huge screen and your imagination has been replaced by tens of millions of CG dollars.

And unlike certain other unnamed toy-movie franchises about morphing forms of transportation and also boomboxes, G.I. Joe's action is lively, coherent, and thoroughly entertaining. Veteran explosion-wrangler Stephen Sommers doesn't bring any special style to his set pieces (he even breaks out the bullet-time more than once), he just puts a lot of spectacular images together in well-edited sequences that speak for themselves.

This puts it well ahead of the writing. I would question why you'd spend several vaults worth of cash on special effects, then budget seven cents, a dead moth, and a ball of lint on the screenplay, but the script has five different writers. That's a basketball team. That's so many writers the reason they had to wait 20 years to make this movie is not enough children knew how to write yet. "No Child Left Behind" wasn't about national standards, it was about meeting G.I. Joe's insatiable hunger for screenwriters.

So when Tatum and Wayans need to prove they're tough, they do so by saying they're tough. Love interests expose their emotional states in precise detail. They try to make the characters interesting with backstories and flashbacks, but it all feels like something we've already seen.

Same deal with the "vengeful madman threatens world order" plot. G.I. Joe does make an effort to be better than it should be; they made some interesting choices for the supporting cast, and they invest a lot of time building some depth for their main players.

If they're looking to take the sequel up to the Batman or Spider-Man levels they seem to want to rub elbows with, I'd suggest starting with dialogue that doesn't belong in a lumberyard and then go from there.

Grade: C+