Tuesday 9 September 2014

GI JOE: Rise and Retaliation

This is a double review for the GI JOE movies which I'm putting together for ease of comparison.

In "Rise of the Cobra" an arms dealer with a score to settle sets in motion a spree of violent attacks and general terrorism on the world. Good thing the elite fighting force known as the GI Joes are there to save the day. The plot mainly follows Duke (Channing Tatum) as he first learns about both Cobra (the bad guys) and the Joes, the latter of which he joins after an "intense" training/testing montage. Part of his training involves some super futuristic body armor that for some reason IS ONLY USED BY THE NEW GUYS. What? There's also a shooting test which seems to be pretty tough to pass. The Joes only take the best you see. Guess they had a lull in recruitment at one point since all the non-named Joes can't hit a barn door.

Not as colorful as their cartoon counterparts.

Cobra on the other hand have awesome bullet proof armor and freaking energy weapons. Too bad that the armor only protects them against the weapons of non-named characters. If Snake Eyes decides to shoot them with his desert eagle, or throw a shuriken at them the armor is useless. Actually I'm not sure why the rest of the team was required at all as Snake Eyes pretty much handles everything himself. That said there are good FX, good action sequences (especially from the flashback kid actors), to make it pretty decent entertainment. I give it three bullets out of five.

In "Retaliation", everything takes a downward spiral. Both the Joes and Cobra lost almost all their high tech gear for more standard issue stuff (though there are very nice vehicles added in). The previous Joe team is mostly replaced by new and mostly less interesting characters too (other than Dwayne Johnson's Roadblock), and while Snake Eyes is still around his introduction arc is very off-beat and he is no longer as useful plot wise as he suffers from a repeated theme in this movie where "Ninjas are Stupid". I suppose Cobra's engineers must also be ninja descendants because their major plan has a pretty big design flaw, outside the plot holes that you will be poking at. Not sure what happened to this movie but I give it only one and a half bullets out of five.

No comments:

Post a Comment