{"id":4779,"date":"2009-08-11T07:20:00","date_gmt":"2009-08-10T23:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chekyang.com\/musings\/2009\/08\/11\/g-i-joe-the-rise-of-cobra\/"},"modified":"2018-03-14T11:22:36","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T03:22:36","slug":"g-i-joe-the-rise-of-cobra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2009\/08\/11\/g-i-joe-the-rise-of-cobra\/","title":{"rendered":"G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"blog-gijoe\" G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra<\/a><\/em> (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<\/em> on Monday afternoon as well after leaving Hannah at Lentor.<\/p>\n

Between Transformers<\/em><\/a> and G. I. Joe<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

The two films on these two cartoon \/ action figure series have a lot in common \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

But funnily, I enjoyed G. I. Joe<\/em> far more than Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen<\/em>. Firstly, the story is at least coherent even if it\u2019s nothing you couldn\u2019t get three monkeys locked in a room with pencil and paper to cook up. Secondly, there\u2019s no let-up in momentum. This is a solid 2 hour wall-to-wall action movie with very few slow moments. Transformers<\/em> in comparison had more of these so-called \u2018character-building\u2019 scenes but they were mind-numbingly insipid.<\/p>\n

Lastly though is that the cast in G. I. Joe<\/em> is far more likable than the human misfits of Transformers 2<\/em>. Who watching the latter wouldn\u2019t have wanted Megatron to squash Leo Spitz into fine powder? Or those two irritating Witwicky parents?<\/p>\n

G. I. Joe<\/em> features a somewhat unknown cast with the exceptions of Dennis Quaid \u2013 whom I\u2019m not sure if was intentionally overacting in his scenes at General Hawk, commander of the \u2018Joes\u2019 \u2013 and Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce \u2013 who was in all three Pirates of the Carribean<\/em><\/a> films but whom I better remember as the sneering media mogul villain in Tomorrow Never Dies<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Of the rest, there\u2019s 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\u2019s him.<\/p>\n

Sienna Miller, better known as Jude Law\u2019s 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 \u2013 better known for his role in The Scary<\/em> Movies <\/em>\u2013 shows up all buffed. He\u2019s the requisite black guy joker in G. I. Joe<\/em>, gets all the best lines in his film and a lot of laughs in the audience.<\/p>\n

I was also pleasantly surprised to see several nods to Director Stephen Sommer\u2019s earlier two The Mummy <\/em>films. Three of his stalwarts show up, two cameos and one in a nearly supporting role: there\u2019s Brendan Fraser as a martial arts Sergeant but looks so unrugged and uncomfortable in military overalls you\u2019ll be thankful his role is cameo only. There\u2019s also Kevin J. O\u2019Connor \u2013 who played the weasely double-crossing Beni in the first Mummy film \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

I asked Ling what she thought of the film \u2013 she said it was \u201cOk but a lot of gun fights\u201d. Me, I enjoyed it for what it is \u2013 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<\/em> film – just so long as Stephen Sommers and not Michael Bay is directing it.<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

(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)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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<\/p>\n

Read More G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entertainment","wpcat-10-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4779\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}