G.I. Joe The Rise of Cobra: Kid Friendly, Intelligent Adults Need Not Apply

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The one positive thing that I can say about G.I. Joe; The Rise of Cobra is that it is a movie that parents can take their kids to. However, that is really all I can recommend about this movie. If you just want a mindless action movie where things blowup and you are someone who is able to ignore the numerous glaring holes in the story's logic, then you might enjoy it. On the other hand, if you are an adult with an I.Q. over 100 you probably will not enjoy it. Overall, this is not a movie worth spending money on, wait and spend it on District 9, the alien movie produced by Lord of The Rings director Peter Jackson, which promises to be a much more enjoyable experience. As for G.I. Joe; The Rise of Cobra, there were just too many blatant examples where the story becomes too illogical to enjoy.

*****SPOILERS*******

The character's motivations for what they are doing this is just purposerous. Cobra was actually Duke's friend, they were soldiers in a war, Cobra goes into a building that gets blown up, survives then turns evil? The Baroness which is the evil girl, played by Sienna Miller, was once good and virtuous and engaged to Duke(Channing Tatum) but her brother, who is coincidently Cobra and still alive and now evil for some reason, uses the nano technology to brain wash her to being evil. That just doesn't make any sense. Cobra is supposed to be evil but the way they presented it in this movie gives him no reason to be. Next, the white ninja, who is evil, is brothers with the black ninja, who is good, when they were boys the black ninja beats his brother in a sparing match, not a real match, just a sparing match, the white ninja then kills the master and turns evil? Why exactly is that a normal reaction to those events? So the bad guys have no real purpose for being bad, they are just bad because this movie needs some bad guys I guess.

Next we come to Channing Tatum who plays Duke. His acting in this movie is so bad that no normal movie goer can possibly believe that his character is supposed to be the leader of the Joe's. He has absolutely zero emotional depth what so ever, his acting could best be described as uninterested. His character just seems completely uninterested in everything going on around him, its like he only has one emtion in the whole movie, and that is bored.

Another point about this movie that I found very troublesome is how unrealistic it is. A movie is allowed to exist outside conventional reality, but then it has to be plausible in that universe the movie creates. This movie does not. The action is very cartoonish, a movie with a budget the size of this thing should be able to look better. There is a scene where The Baroness and The White Ninja are in a hummer trying to get away and the Joe's blowup the car sending it flying and then smashing back to the ground. The random bad guys are of course dead, however, The Baroness and The White Ninja are not only alive, they crawl out of the burning reckage unharmed and run away from the accident. Not even believable if they were supposed to be super heroes.

Finally, one of the biggest problems I had with this movie is the supersuits that Duke and Ripcord wear. These suits are pretty much just a rip off of Iron Man, and no where in the actual G.I. Joe cartoon did these suits ever exist. Duke and Ripcord are not part of the Joe's at the beginning of the movie, they become defacto member after basically begging to stay on and help. They go through a 30 second montage of them doing obstacle courses. Then, they are the ones that wear the million dollar super suits. There only appears to be two of these suits in the entire movie, and the two guys who are not even real G.I. Joe members are the ones that wear them? Those suits shouldn't have even been in the movie, but they are and it is absolutely ridiculous to believe Duke and Ripcord would be the ones to wear them. And the things the suits do, they make the soliders super speed, extremely strong, with rocket lauchers on their arm, so any level of belivability and any semblence to the actual G.I. Joes cartoon just completely evaporates. G.I. Joes are really just supposed to be normal soliders. In this movie though, they have crazy little other worldly gadgets, like when one G.I. had these needles attached to a computer, stuck the needles in the head of a dead man so that the last images he saw would download to the computer. What? That isnt even something they would have had in Star Trek, let alone G.I. Joes.

I was a fan of G.I. Joes growin up, and was very excited to hear they were going to make a movie out of it. However, I could not have been more disappointed with the over produced over commercialized facsimile that this movie turned out to be. They owed more to a movie that already had a built in audience and a guarantee of blockbuster status. Just very very upset the studio did not think more of their audiences intelligence.