G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009) – at AMK Hub. Mum invited us over for dinner on the National Holiday holiday, so we took the opportunity to catch G. I. Joe on Monday afternoon as well after leaving Hannah at Lentor.
Between Transformers and G. I. Joe, I have even less impressions of the latter from early years. As a young growing up boy in the 80s, I was more fascinated with Gummi Bears for its whacky humor than cartoon shows with combat figurines.
The two films on these two cartoon / action figure series have a lot in common – both were released in the same time period, both are very loud, both have stories that are sideshows to the action, and both are so very CGed.
But funnily, I enjoyed G. I. Joe far more than Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Firstly, the story is at least coherent even if it’s nothing you couldn’t get three monkeys locked in a room with pencil and paper to cook up. Secondly, there’s no let-up in momentum. This is a solid 2 hour wall-to-wall action movie with very few slow moments. Transformers in comparison had more of these so-called ‘character-building’ scenes but they were mind-numbingly insipid.
Lastly though is that the cast in G. I. Joe is far more likable than the human misfits of Transformers 2. Who watching the latter wouldn’t have wanted Megatron to squash Leo Spitz into fine powder? Or those two irritating Witwicky parents?
G. I. Joe features a somewhat unknown cast with the exceptions of Dennis Quaid – whom I’m not sure if was intentionally overacting in his scenes at General Hawk, commander of the ‘Joes’ – and Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce – who was in all three Pirates of the Carribean films but whom I better remember as the sneering media mogul villain in Tomorrow Never Dies.
Of the rest, there’s the wushu and katana wielding expert Ray Parks a.k.a. Darth Maul, but he spends his entire screen length hidden behind a mask and body armor so you could never tell it’s him.
Sienna Miller, better known as Jude Law’s girlfriend, has the meaty role of the dominatrix villainess. She looks like a cross between Carrie-Anne Moss, Kate Beckinsale and Maggie Q in those tight black leather outfits, sunglasses and super-wild kungfu moves. And Marlon Wayans – better known for his role in The Scary Movies – shows up all buffed. He’s the requisite black guy joker in G. I. Joe, gets all the best lines in his film and a lot of laughs in the audience.
I was also pleasantly surprised to see several nods to Director Stephen Sommer’s earlier two The Mummy films. Three of his stalwarts show up, two cameos and one in a nearly supporting role: there’s Brendan Fraser as a martial arts Sergeant but looks so unrugged and uncomfortable in military overalls you’ll be thankful his role is cameo only. There’s also Kevin J. O’Connor – who played the weasely double-crossing Beni in the first Mummy film – has an even smaller role as a scientist. And rounding up the trio is Arnold Vosloo who played the Mummy in both films. I was half expecting to see Rachel Weisz show up somewhere too LOL.
The visuals are a bit of a mixed bag though. The outdoor scenes and chase scene in Paris were amazing, but the end-film undersea battle looked so very CGed. There’s also that scene of the Eiffel Tower crashing, but all the good parts of that are already in the trailer that you can watch over and over again.
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I asked Ling what she thought of the film – she said it was “Ok but a lot of gun fights”. Me, I enjoyed it for what it is – a wall-to-wall action flick with no Oscar pretensions, and entertainment designed purely for Paramount Pictures to start up another super-hero film franchise. There’s indeed hope for the eventual Transformers 3 film – just so long as Stephen Sommers and not Michael Bay is directing it.
(And finally: see if you can catch what’s on the notebook computers during the early scene where bad guy McCullen explains his nanomites. “In the not-too distant future”, computers are still using… Windows Vista…?! ROFLMAO)
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