Deadbeat Summer

I don't know shit about G.I. Joe. Well, that's a lie. My older brother sometimes watched it when we were kids. I will now list everything I know about G.I. Joe:

- The US knows where Cobra Island is, and every week those wacky Cobra folks come up with some new hair-brained scheme and the Joes have to shoot around their feet until they give up. For some reason (probably the UN), we can't just nuke Cobra Island.

- There was an episode where they found a mermaid.

- They had enough R&D funding to make money-powered space-jets that fired money.

I was too busy being a four-year-old Trekkie to watch any G.I. Joe shit.

But my god, that stuff must be Jody Hill compared to this movie. Anyone who knows my taste knows that I'll give free passes to action movies on a lot of things because I think it is a horrifically underrated art form. I love kitsch, and movies with characters named things like Dr. Mindbender, and villains that dress in black with mechanical apparatuses attached to their bodies, and underground lairs and heroic heroes and over-the-top action. I have genuine love and affection for these things and I was hoping against all logic that G.I. Joe would put these elements together in an exciting, original and fun way.

I couldn't have been more wrong. I can't even figure out where to begin on this monstrosity. With the plot, I suppose. Through a series of endless flashbacks we find out that Cobra are the bad guys and the Joes are the good guys. Who gives a shit. Flubber gets shot at the Eiffel Tower in one scene.

It stars Channing fucking Tatum and Marlon "Little Man" Wayans, two of the worst actors alive as a couple of buddy soldiers. The acting in this film is so bad that it makes Dennis Quaid look like a good actor. The only thing redeeming about this film, and I mean that quite literally, is Joseph Gordon-Levitt when he gets in his scientist garb. His voice is cartoonishly evil and the only time I got the impression that I was watching a brilliant piece of kitsch action was when he did that voice. It's the only time the film felt like it should have.

More than any of those problems, more than the endless flashbacks and misuse of great material, is that the action in the film sucks. It looks like an action film from 1993. Specifically, Street Fighter. There's a scene where the Joes chase the Cobras through Paris as they try to fire their flubber gun at the Eiffel Tower that could easily have been a lot of fun, but it's undercut by something very simple: the suits that the Joes wear. They look heavy and cumbersome. It doesn't look right when they move in them and it takes you out of the excitement. Additionally, there's a lot of misplaced slow-motion and general ineptitude behind the camera. I won't even go into all the editing problems the film has, not the least of which is how the action is edited so poorly that all sense of location is lost.

What else? The visual effects. My god, the visual effects. At least Transformers 2 had some incredible visual effects to look at, but G.I. Joe's wouldn't have been cutting-edge five years ago. The whole film looks really cheap for a summer film and it feels like a tax write-off. The only person who seems to be putting in any effort is Gordon-Levitt, who suffers some awful makeup work at the end of the film as punishment.

Although it's not as bad as being the mascot for high in iron Gushers like Christopher Eccleston, the poor bastard.

And the title doesn't make any fucking sense. The whole film Cobra just gets their asses kicked and at the end they've been fucked into submission by the hyper-masculine, electrical tape-wielding Joes. It would be like calling a film about The Black Plague "The Rise of Hand-Washing and Regular Baths in Western Europe". If I shouted "From now on, you will call me Cobra Commander!" at a crowd of strangers and started signing the card reader at the gas station "Cobra Commander", I would have accomplished roughly the same thing as Cobra actually accomplished in this film.

Additionally, it's the most tangential film of all time. We spend about half our time in flashbacks for minor characters that we don't give a shit about. I'm not joking when I say we spend about ten minutes learning the backstory of a character that DOESN'T SAY A FUCKING WORD. The entire movie. Who gives a shit that he was a street urchin when he was a kid? It's a weak way to try and raise the stakes in the final battle. We just keep flashing back to this guy's childhood completely unprovoked because, well he never says anything.

This is a putrid, assaultive, boring movie that could have been great. The wasted potential makes it all the more sad that it's so incredibly awful. I'll give it half a point for Joseph Gordon Levitt's voice, and half a point for the shot of the majestic polar bear.

2/10