G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

To be fair to the movie, looking back on a childhood spent with G.I. Joe, the characters and especially the villains could have only made sense in the mind of a child. If a film was to be made based on the comic book and action figures, a certain level of absurdity has to be expected if the source material was to be honored. But come on, they couldn’t do better than this? Recent comic adaptations have set a relative high mark for this genre of cinema, so when a film fails, as G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra painfully does, the disappointment is that much greater.

Just last year, The Dark Knight pitted Batman against the psychotic villainy of the Joker. Heath Ledger’s performance of that unbalanced lunatic earned him an Oscar nomination and proved the genre is capable of studying deeply buried human pain and torment while raising that struggle to the artistic level. Even the X-Men series with its ensemble of superhuman characters has been able to create a believable world out of the impossible. Not so with G.I. Joe.

At first glance it would appear an easier task concoct a reasonable fictionalized reality out of a story following an elite group of soldiers fighting a shadowy terrorist group calling themselves Cobra. The terrorist angle certainly rings true today and keeping the name does honor the tradition of the comic. But why did director Stephen Sommers have to rely on so much CGI that half of the film is closer to a cartoon than live action? Why couldn’t any of soldiers use a weapon that is even slightly grounded in the real world? Why couldn’t the screenwriting team come up with at least one decent line of dialogue? Why couldn’t the story lines of vengeance that drove the leaders of Cobra to such depths of evil at least seem plausible to have that sort of effect on a human soul? Why? Why? Why?

Perhaps this is all Hasbro’s fault. The toy making giant has obviously not been able to sell the rights to their franchises to any sort of competent filmmaking teams. Transformers 2 is probably the worst major studio release of the past decade with the original Transformers and now G.I. Joe following closely behind. If any sort of 1980s childhood innocence was still alive and on life support after Transformers 2 earlier this summer, it is dead, G.I. Joe just pulled the plug.