Apparently, Paramount sees Channing Tatum as "more of an asset now". Guessing that is from the screenings.
The previews looked good. I wonder what went wrong?
Maybe Rock / Bruce Willis tried to make it funny (which we did not see in the previews) and it failed.
Maybe it was too cartoony, like RoC. Who knows.......
For a couple of months now........I've had a growing disquieting feeling about the movie.
I loved the trailers just fine, got me stoked.... but something......I couldn't put my finger on it until last week....and even then.....the quality of the trailers didn't let me embrace this idea:
There's not a whole lot of scale here.
For an "army movie"....the trailers never show more than about a dozen people in any shot--often less.
Now granted, the premise here is that the Joes are gutted as a force and that COBRA rolls in and takes over. But not even COBRA gets any juicy numbers on screen here.
No sense of scale here.........and no sense of a climax here.
Based on the premise, and the shots we'eve seen in the trailer-the locales shown more or less reveal their place in the story.
New Orleans is likely around the part of the climax, because of the big glorious shot of RoadRock on the Ripsaw hip-firing the M2. So all the shots of the Ripsaw rolling around are from there too.
So is the Ripsaw the "big weapon" to save the day? That.............feels kind of light-weight to me.......like something cooked up in the A-Teams garage--and we all remember how cheezy that was.
And then there's the shot of Roadrock firing a SAW minimi while fast-roping Aussie-style inside some base-like location--a rocket gantry, a refinery? Another PIT? THE PIT???
.....and there's the whole Ninja Mountain stuff....I cannot juxtapose how all these bits fit into the body of the film ( and that is actually a good thing)--but when I read that the movie is in trouble.........then it raises questions to the surface.
But back to that sense of scale......
If we are expected to believe that the GIJOE team is capable at all, and that a handful of them can save the day......then it raises the proper question: What do we need the rest of 'em for? If you don't bring in that army into play, that sense of scale.......my story sense calls that unsatisfying and awkward.
I suspect now, they are going to pull the "coma" card....and have the Joe team playing possum throughout, and arriving over the hill at the 11th hour to save the day........ and Duke will be leading the charge.
That is typically "GIJOE" and it might be something that can help the movie....but it all depends on what the rest of the story is like.
