davywavy | GI Joe (Review)

It's difficult to know where to start reviewing the latest summer blockbuster to land on our doorsteps, Gi Joe. Watching it wasn't like that time a few years ago when I found myself sitting through Ultraviolet and it slowly dawning upon me that I was watching the worst film I'd ever seen in my life and I was going to be able to write all kinds of funny stuff about it later. Nor was it like sitting through a really good film and being able to come out and say "Wow! That was great! Go and see it, everyone!"
The problem which GI Joe: The rise of Cobra (to give it the full title) has is that it isn't bad. It's isn't good, either. It's just noisily, expensively, mediocre. It's the sort of film where the director proudly proclaims in interview that 'every dollar of the budget is up on screen', and it's only later that you realise this is because they've CGI'd a huge pile of money into shot.
To be fair, it isn't as mediocre as Batman and Robin which I actually managed to forget I'd seen in the two hours between walking out of the cinema and being asked by someone what I'd done that day.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around an evil arms manufacturer & dealer (played by Christopher Eccleston) trying to take over the world and the efforts of a highly-trained, international crack squad of underwear models to stop him. They may actually be soldiers, not models. It's never entirely clear.
Eccleston's plan to take over the world involves the sort of imbecilic planning so loved by James Bond villains everywhere; having just sold some new 'nanobombs' (a hilariously indiscriminate and horrific WMD) to NATO, he then steals them back to hold the world to ransom. Seemingly it never occurred to him simply to build the bombs for himself and just not tell anyone. There then follows an extended special effects/chase sequence through the street of Paris which follows the plot structure of the opening scenes to Team America: World Police so closely that I can only assume it was some sort of big-budget homage. French people and cultural landmarks are bowled aside like ninepins before it all cumulates with the destruction of the Eiffel Tower.
As the leader of the squad says with a ironic but merry twinkle as he surveys the destruction, "The French are very upset", and this pretty much sums up the tone of the film. Thousands of Americans die in tower-related disaster? Catastrophic atrocity! Thousands of French die in similar? Entertaining Megalolz!

Anyway, by this stage we're only a third of the way through the film and you can be assured that there are plenty more special effects and sympathetic script decisions where that came from. The GI Joe team operate out of a base in Egypt (despite this the only Egyptian we ever see is a primitive camel herder who is quickly murdered) and this base is attacked by the villains and explosions happen and there are fights and...oh, you get the picture. There is nothing - nothing - in this film you haven't seen a thousand times before, and often done better. The fight sequences are jump-cut in that deeply irritating way which is so fashionable at the moment, thus rendering the decision to cast two world-class martial artists (as the two ninjas, Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow) completely irrelevant as you never get to see what they can do. Indeed, all the violence in the film (and there's a lot of it - human lives are discarded in a remarkably cavalier fashion by both good and evil alike) is curiously bloodless; even people cut with knives only end up with welts which don't bleed, like they've been attacked with a red permanent marker.
And throughout all of the explosions, special effects, running and shouting, my heart rate didn't shift above resting once. For all the thrills I got out of it, I might as well have been watching a particularly lively wall.

The only really good bit is the costume design. During the dramatic denouement featuring villainous pontificating by the Cobra Commander as his underwater arctic base is destroyed by sinking polar ice (because, you know, the ice cap is made of some of that special non-floating ice) I found myself looking at the screen and thinking; "That's a jolly nice suit. I do wonder who his tailor is."

Which I think says all you need to know.