I didn't like it.
I thought it came across as a bunch of uneven fluff.........but then asking for some real "meat" in a GIJOE movie isn't going to happen anyway.
It's probably the most politically "corporate" movie made in the last few years, what with its pointless delay for unneeded 3D enhancement, and its after-the-fact addition of more Channing Tatum, and the location of its climax.
It's clearly a movie-made-by-committee, bankrolled by a toy company looking to milk its IP. Okay, that's a given. But it falls apart almost as soon as it starts.
We get force-fed Channing Tatum as Duke, a warm re-acquaintance in the first 15 minutes, showing how he's such a nice guy, so friendly and supportive of his comrades.
Then they just arbitrarily kill him.
Okay.
But in doing so, they trip up because they just robbed the audience of the set-up emotional core of the film........the only "likeable" character in the whole cluster......and they just callously kill him off.
This does a couple of things: one-its squanders any peril for any of the heroes left, because we KNOW that with the slate wiped clean, no-one else is going to die. No peril= no drama. No drama= no real point to the proceedings that follow.
2nd follows close behind this: why should we care from this point on? The character arcs in this movie are all pre-destined from the point of the GIJOE team being wiped out.......because the few that are left are the ones that have to rebuild. There's no REAL threat to them because they are all that's left.
Again, that's the under-lying corporate politics of the movie at work.
There's no reason to care about anyone, because they are all just cyphers, going through the motions. But GIJOE has always been this shallow, characterization is just something that gets tacked on.
The Fort Sumter location was dull. They filmed it in the most un-dramatic time of day possible, out in the open, in broad daylight--in a location that......well, made me wonder WHY they were there in the first place.
Well, I KNOW why? Tax credits. The state of Louisiana and city of New Orleans offered irresistible tax credits to the production of this movie to film there, so as a corporate decision ( business politics, again) they picked that state and shoe-horned the tourist trap that is Fort Sumter into the story.
I mean, here's the litmus test: could they have located that meeting place anywhere else and told the SAME story, or bettered it with a locale more suited to more dramatic situations?
Well, you bet they could!
This was a case of a production trying to save some bucks and going with whatever was laying around. Namely what was cheap.
I thought the setting was like something out of a TV movie, and not really all that dramatic or interesting for a feature film. It was a weak sauce location, and they tried to make the best of it. Yawn.
Joe Colton.
Big problem with the "original" GIJOE: he's GIJOE in name only. Where's the scar that's been a part of the original GIJOE tradition since day one? The character is supposed to be a nod-of-the-head to the original 12" toys........but no scar? That ain't Joe, sorry.
If they'd added the scar.......I could have accepted whatever else they did with the character, but that ONE omission....blew it.
The missing ROC characters.
Not even a mention-in-passing for them. They simply do not get talked about.......they don't exist, as far as this movie is concerned--and yet, the director wants to bring some of them back for GIJOE3??? That also doesn't fly, because without a mention in Retaliation's script, one has to wonder, just waht are these characters doing? Are they still around? If they are, the dramatic points of a story would call for at least a cameo to address what they are doing.
Their team has been wiped out, they as members of the unit have been outlawed as criminals.
And only ONE person remembers enough about the team's history to turn to the "one man that can help them". NO-ONE ELSE knows or remembers the unit's first commanding officer??? That's a serious WTF, a HUGE plot hole--large enough to spin the USS FLAGG through.
The end result is that if we can't care about any of the old characters, then really why should we care much about the new characters?
That's a critical story flaw.
My last major beef comes back to corporate politics again.........the 3D gimmick. They delayed the movie for 9 months because of this boondoggle, and I thought it was a utter waste of time. The 3D made this movie hard to watch, it was glaring and made ALL the action sequences difficult to follow. I have a bias against 3D to begin with, I went in being leery of it, but the execution of it in Retaliation just cemented things.
I learned later, to my chagrin that there was a 2D showing playing in my area, and I could have gone to that........but the damage was done.
I left the theatre saying that there probably was a movie that I could have liked somewhere in there, but a lot of things conspired against me.
Its the same thing as ROC, which I thought wasn't "awful", but wasn't very good either. Its just more of the same, with a little bit more window dressing to try to convince fans that the writers and director "get" GIJOE. I don't think the problem is that they get it, I think that......at the end of the day, GIJOE just really doesn't have enough meat to its bones to make for a good movie.
