Well.............
...to quote Mr. Horse: "No sir.........I don't like it."
I think there was an okay movie somewhere in there, it was just mudsucked by BS.
My main problem with the movie was the 3D. The AVX showing I saw convinced me of one thing: I'm now an avowed opponent of 3D films. The 3d gimmick made watching all the action sequences difficult. Hard to focus on anything, hard to keep track of anything.
It committed the unpardonable sin of cinema: it was distracting and it took me out of the story and the rapport for the characters. I gave up......repeatedly, in watching this thing....told myself I'll give it a go when it comes out on Blu-Ray in a few months. A movie shouldn't do that.
We waited 9 MONTHS for this nonsense........and, well, I'm glad it didn't give me a headache.
Story-wise.....it was a TV movie plot with a feature film budget. Its plain to see they mudsucked GIJOE: Renegades for this movie......pulled the same basic premise from the cartoon. I kept asking myself, is that the ONLY story they could come up with??
There's a lot of really bone-headed things in the movie.....the one big one that struck me, made me actually laugh is right at the climax: COBRA's Zeus orbital guns blow up when Roadblock stops the countdown.
Okay.
So, COBRA technology throws a "tantrum" when its shut off and not allowed to do what it's designed to do?? Yeah, COBRA Quality control--right on!! Why are they a threat again???
Yeah, that's been seen before, but its still pretty stupid. And funny.
Other than that, the story is pretty light weight, the missile launch sequence and the bombardment of London was kind of neat.....but......the rest was fluff.
( and to hit THAT point home, the end of the movie has a bizarre omission: we see the mourning the loss of the Joes, we celebrate the heroes that save the day........but what about London? Untold history wiped away, Ten's of thousands likely dead......and no mention of them after the fact. Nothing of THE greatest terrorist attack in history. Wow.)
Characters.
<Sigh>. Big beefs here. And more failed story points.
So, GIJOE is now demoted to having the mostly the supporting cast run the missions from now on? When I think of GIJOE RAH, Duke is the cornerstone. Like him or not, he's the face of it, the main guy.
But he's dead, and worse than that.......they gave him a personality in this movie and THEN they kill him. WTF?
What was the point? Get the audience to care about a character and then yank the same character away from us? Why should we invest any rapport in the movie? Big mistake.
They could have run the story that the Joes are ALL captured, sentenced to that cryo-prison, and then have the guys that escape come rescue them. Does the same service as "getting rid of the Joes" for most of the story, but allows you to use them again at a later time. Instead......we get force-fed Roadblock.
Now, I like the Rock, he's got great charisma, and screen presence....but he was shoehorned into this movie. This is a Rock-vehicle....tailored to be "the star". But I've NEVER seen Roadblock as a leader of the team, he's strictly been a supporting cast member to my mind. Killing of Duke and others is like taking Batman and Alfred out of a Batman movie and running it with the rest of the supporting cast from then on. The guts of it have been ripped out.
Why?? Its an awkward promotion for a character that.......well, is redundant. We had Heavy Duty in the first flick, and then we get his clone in the second flick. ( Of course, I know the deal is that its the other way around: RB came first and HD is the clone, so to speak) This is the inherent problem with GIJOE's translation to live-action cinema....the roster is vast and redundant at the same time. You can plug practically any 2 or three characters into essentially the same functional role within the movie......and it doesn't take long before the question becomes......why??
And it doesn't stop with the Rock.
Bruce Willis was wasted in this movie......really quite useless. He was a piece of furniture.....a plot device like any of the guns.( of which he has the LATEST gear tucked away all over his home. Okaaaay) His character didn't grow, change or really do much of anything that any of the other characters could have been contrived to do. Now, the same thing is with the Rock.......he has a presence......he doesn't have a story arc. There's no growth.
The same thing with Jinx.
And Mouse.
And COBRA Commander, and Firefly--though they were just there to be the bad guys, they were pretty shallow as such. Sure, its nice to see CC looking all properly "CC", but again.....what WAS the point. His emotional effect in the movie was the exactly same quality as in any of the pre-publicity still........he just. looked. like. Cobra Commander.
That's all he does.
No, this isn't Citizen Kane, its not high-cinema.......its a product. But it came across as pretty vapid product to me......real soap-bubble thin. All it would have taken is a couple of throw-away lines, a casual inference or three, here and there and these characters would have a modicum of ( at least the APPEARANCE of ) some depth to them.
The ONLY character with any kind of genuine story arc to them is Storm Shadow. But even then, I never really caught why he signed up from COBRA in the first place.
Zartan could also be considered to have an arc.....but he arrived at the end exactly as he started out.....still a scene-chewing bad-guy.
So, really........for me......anything this movie offered was given away in the previews before I even walked into the theatre. They held this back 9 months to give it an awful 3D post-conversion. It is exactly what I'd jadedly expected it to be: a two hour-long toy commercial with a weak fluff story, really dumb story-point /franchise choices.....and a smattering of "lipstick and mascara on the pig" to appease the fans.
I like said before...I sincerely think there's an okay movie somewhere in there, but once again, its (still) not REALLY a GIJOE movie.
