Posted by John
The other night I watched the new-to-DVD movie GI Joe: Rise of the Cobra. Oh man, what a disappointment. It should more appropriately have been titled GI Joke: Rise of the Suck; it was that bad. It was like instead of making an actual movie the producers of the film decided to just drop a huge deuce on my childhood memories.
GI Joes were my absolute favorite toys growing up. Between my brother and I we had all the major characters – Duke, Roadblock, Swift Kick, Snake Eyes, Storm Shadow, Alpine, Barbeque, Blow Torch, Cutter… I could go on, and believe me, I could. We would play with those toys day and night, week after week, year after year, until inevitably the little rubber band that held the torso of the action figure to the legs would snap and the Joe was resigned to his ultimate fate – a firecracker shoved up his butt then a shallow grave in the backyard for his remains.
The only other toys that came close to competing with the Joes for my time and affection as a child were Legos. I would tear into a new package of Legos, build the castle or the pirate’s cove or the tree house, deconstruct it, build it again, deconstruct it, build something new, deconstruct it, build something new again… so on and so forth until the Legos lost their usefulness and were resigned to their ultimate fate – a firecracker and a shallow grave in the backyard.
The only advantage Legos had over GI Joes was the opportunity to exercise the burgeoning builder in me. My favorite thing was to combine several sets of Legos and build something wild and crazy no one had ever seen before. I thought I was so awesome at it that I would take pictures of my creations and make my dad send them off to Lego corporate in hopes they would consider me for a full time position as a Lego designer. I never did hear back from Lego, primarily because my dad was a pragmatic man and rather than waste the postage he just mailed those pictures directly to the dumpster. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t blame the man at all. In fact, I applaud him for saving me from the inevitable embarrassment. If I ever have a kid who aspires to create some newfangled bullshit out of his toys then tries to send pictures off to corporate for their approval I’ll do the same thing my dad did, except I’ll probably also just tell my kid his creations are shit. Like, “Look kid, that toy came with instructions for a reason - follow them. If you want to show off your creativity here’s some gunpowder, a couple wicks, and a few matches. Make me proud. Oh, and by the way, your little friend, Pete – he’s just imaginary, which means he’s not real. The sooner you come to grips with that the sooner you’ll stop getting your ass kicked at pre-school.”
Anyway, I think part of the reason the GI Joe movie was so disappointing and terrible was because the toys were so special to me as a child and the nostalgia in me just wanted it to be good. But the other part of the terribleness was because the movie was just full of suck. On paper it sounded like a foolproof film: Take an endearing concept from my childhood – check; Add in a boatload of weapons and ammunition – roger that; Throw in like 8 or 9 explosions per minute (EPM) for the entire duration of the film – got it; Sprinkle in a healthy dose of gratuitous cleavage – done and done. That right there sounds like a badass movie. Unfortunately the producers of the actual film screwed the pooch when they tried to mix in a plot that was likely conceived by a script writer who still had 7 or 8 imaginary friends. Believe me, I’m not spoiling anything by recounting the synopsis of the film here: The bad guys have created nanotechnology-based weapons that are capable of destroying an entire city in the form of warheads that contain “nano-mites” that can eat through any substance on earth whilst simultaneously multiplying themselves on an exponential level. The bad guys have further engineered the nano-mites so they can be injected directly into your brain where they can control your thoughts and actions, so between the warhead-mites and brain-mites the bad guys have the capability of destroying the entire planet and/or controlling its entire population. Enter the Joes who are obviously the only ones capable of stopping the madness and saving humanity.
Believe me, I’m not making any of that up. If I was 4, like I was when I first started playing with GI Joes, I probably would have eaten that shit right up and loved every second of it without asking any questions. But since I’m not 4 I require a little bit more substance to my movies than some bad guy controlling a bunch of nano-mites with his iPhone or something. Seriously, that’s pretty much how it happens in the movie. What happens when Cobra Commander wanders outside of his 3G network and doesn’t get a signal on his phone? Then what? Boom – terrorist threat averted. Look at me; I’m not even a Joe and I still just saved the day. That’s how stupid this plot is.
The movie is then made infinitely worse by the embarrassing acting from top to bottom, starting with the main character, Duke, played by the up-and-coming, and enviably pectoraly-enhanced actor, Channing Tatum. It’ not so much that Tatum can’t act, it’s that he can’t even speak. Seriously, he talks like he has a bunch of diarrhea in his mouth. The director should have recognized this on day one and been like, “Alright, Channing, here’s the deal - since it sounds like you’re eating a Philly cheese steak sandwich while you’re delivering your lines, we’re going to go ahead and remove all your speaking parts from the film. Instead, anytime you’re required to say anything we’re going to have you just take off your shirt and flex your pecs up and down as if they were speaking for you. How does that sound?” In fact, they should have had all the actors speak with their pecs and/or boobs, then I might have actually enjoyed the film.
In stark contrast to the suckiness of GI Joe, the new Terminator movie, Salvation, is certifiably badass. It has boatloads of guns, 8 or 9 EPM’s, and plenty of gratuitous cleavage. Plus, it has a legit plot, real actors, and badass cyborgs. That’s non-stop entertainment from start to finish. In fact, even the wife enjoyed it. Right up until the end, that is, when they had to perform some sort of medical procedure to save the life of one of the characters. The wife was all like, “Oh that is such bullshit! It’s not even possible to perform that procedure!” I just glared at her with complete contempt, contemplating whether I wanted to divorce her or kick her in the teeth. First of all, the movie is set like 8 years in the future; you have no idea what types of medical procedures will or will not be possible 8 years from now. Second of all, you just sat through two fucking hours of a film about a war between humans and machines with artificial intelligence that have made it their primary goal to extinguish the entire human race and the only hope for humanity is a dude, who looks and sounds strangely like Batman, who must find his father, who incidentally is actually younger than he is, invent time travel, send his futuristic younger version of his dad back to the past to save his mother and impregnate her with him so he can be born in order to lead the resistance and defeat the machines, all at the behest of his mother who is dead but whose voice has been persevered for eternity on a tape recorder… After all of that, now you are going to take exception to the film because of a fucking medical procedure that comprises about 10 seconds of the movie!?!? For fuck’s sake, from my blissfully ignorant perspective I’m inclined to put my betting wages on a fucking medical procedure coming to fruition before some fucking free-thinking, humanity-killing cyborgs!!!
Whatever. Don’t be dissuaded by the wife’s medically-based skepticism of the end of the movie; Terminator is a quality piece of cinema, especially when compared to the bed wetting suckiness of GI Joe. There’s no ending that could have salvaged that film. Actually, I take that back – I might have given it a pass if Duke had captured Cobra Commander at the end, shoved an M80 firecracker up his rectum, then buried his remains in a shallow grave in his backyard. At least then I would have felt a little nostalgia for the film.
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