GI Joe delivers all action, all the time, but is that enough to make for an entertaining film? (spoiler free!)
The annoying thing about all the big dumb action in GI Joe is that despite that bigness and dumbness, it's essentially an entertaining enough film. Now, that may well be damning with the very faintest of praise, but really... what more can you ask of a film based on a toy franchise?
GI Joe rarely pauses for anything so gauche as character development or real plot development. Hell - it barely pauses, period! From the film's oddly historical prologue, the screen is either filled with brooding, scenery chewing, flashbacks or the kind of epic action set pieces normally reserved the ending of a James Bond film. In fact, that's easily the best way to describe the film - imagine the climax of just about every Bond adventure, and then edit them all together into one hyperkinetic sequence.
That's GI Joe.
I've got to admit, I'd not been expecting much beyond mindless entertainment - not only was I not let down, but the sheer cajones of the writers and the director - The Mummy's Stephen Somers - to throw ludicrous gadget after half-arsed plot-development on top of insane stunts (and rinse-repeat) was kind of charming.
Charming too are some of the performances. Dennis Quaid can actually act when he puts his mind to it, but in these he seems to be doing his best John Wayne impersonation - and it kind of works. Jonathan Pryce, another fine actor, does solid enough work with a brief role as the US President, and Brendan Fraser makes a remarkably underutilised appearance as well. He must be too busy making gimmick 3D movies to actually do something entertaining. There's also a Wayans, of the Marlon variety, who actually didn't make me want to kill myself with his performance.
Surely a directorial win right there.
On the flipside, though, you've got a great actor in Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Brick FTW!), and he gets, well... let's just say GI Joe is not likely getting a place in his show reel.
But let's be honest - this is not an actor's film (to paraphrase Megan Fox and her commentary on Transformers 2). This is a film about gung-ho elites fighting an insidious super-powered threat, and about the rise of a new power for evil. And blowing stuff up. A lot. The effects are pretty solid throughout, though some shots of the Accelerator Suit sequences (a powered armour that lets users run, leap and fight with superhuman ability) do push the limits of belief. There's also a tendency to linger on a lot of the hardware, which is neat to a degree, but you can't help feeling that you're being exposed to a very long toy advert at times, rather than a film.
Each change of scene seems to bring a new gun, or a new armour type, or a new gadget or... you get the idea. Early on, it seems like GI Joe may well be aiming for something like verisimilitude, but that's thrown out the window pretty fast. From underwater machine guns, to energy weapons, to city-destroying nanites to wrist-mounted caseless chainguns, this is a gearhead's gear-fest without rival.
Perhaps most surprising is not only that the film isn't half bad (though, you do need to add 'for a toy-based franchise' to that statement), but that's it's not at all as fatiguing given how fast the pace is. There are enough (albeit brief) pauses to let your eardrums stop ringing and your suspended disbelief relax; at the same time, production decisions, like training the actors with live ammunition, deliver enough realism that there's at least some belief in what's happening on-screen. Ray Park's Snake-eyes is a perfect case-in-point; for a guy who fights in head to toe black armour, has taken a vow of silence since the murder of his sensei when he was child, and pairs a katana with Glock in combat, he kinda sells the whole thing.
GI Joe is the sort of film that is largely pointless critiquing, but if there's one thing that does jar about the film (and yeah, for every corny-yet-cool performance, there's a corny-and-just-plain-dire one, but again - toy-based film), it's the odd mix of violence and bloodlessness. There are many exploded heads, for instance, but no gore, or sword fights that result in oddly bloodless cuts and contusions. And then someone gets a bump in the head in a car crash and the blood flows copiously. I can only imagine this is part of the film's general struggle to maintain as low a rating as possible. This is a film that's going to make more money in the marketing of toys than in the cinema take, so it needs lots of kiddies to walk through the door.
And you might want to join them, if you're after a bit of spectacle. But don't look for nuance.
Issue: 111 | April, 2010