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.jpg) While doing an interview with Leonard Maltin to promote his film “Stop-Loss,” Joseph Gordon-Levitt contrasts that film with the film he was shooting at the time, “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.” Of “Stop-Loss," Gordon-Levitt said that “[Stop-Loss] is what it’s like to be an American soldier today. ‘G.I. Joe’ has nothing to do with that. ‘G.I. Joe is what it’s like to be an action figure.”
I like Joseph’s wording in this interview. It may have been an accident, but notice that he didn’t say that “G.I. Joe” is what it’s like to be an action hero. The film isn’t an action hero movie in the sense of Jason Bourne, MacGyver or even Spider-Man. Yes, Gordon-Levitt has it right. The film bares more resemblance to what it’s like to be an action figure in the grasp to two brothers; the older brother verbally writing a lose and ultimately pointless plot as the younger brother bashes the action figures together while making ‘kaboom’ sounds with his mouth.
It was 2001 when I last saw a Stephen Sommers movie and now I remember why. As I sat watching “G.I Joe” I could feel the logic receptors in my brain working overtime to make sense out of an ultimately senseless story. All the while, I could feel my brain slowly turning to mush as the loud soundtrack pounded my eardrums and explosions flashed before my eyes. If there were going to be a study as to if a movie could possibly make you dumber for having seen it, the researchers could possibly start with “G.I. Joe.”
The plot of the film is inconsequential, but I’ll run you through it anyway. There are bad guys who work for a firm that has been developing some sort of nanotechnologies that can eat through steal. Once made into a weapon, the holder of the nanotechnologies would have the power to destroy entire cities and maybe the world. The evil company that developed the weapons sells four warheads to the United States, but then ambushes the convoy moving the warheads, stealing them back. Why did they hand over the warheads to the U.S. in the first place? It seems like a strange move which brings the corporation into the U.S. conscience as a threat. If the company never handed over the warheads, then they could have just used them and would have never had the “G.I. Joe” squad trying to thwart their efforts, but I digress. In the convoy is Duke, played dully by Channing Tatum, and his best friend Ripcord, played annoyingly by Marlon Wayans.
There are back-stories for everyone. Duke dated and almost married one of the bad guys, Ana played by Sienna Miller, before the death of her bother (played by Gordon-Levitt). The most jarring of the back-stories is that of SnakeEyes, played by Ray Park. He has a brother who now fights for the bad guys and we learn how they became enemies as children. We’re told all of this through flashback sequences, which would be a great escape from the loud, explosion-filled main story, but even the flashbacks are chalked full of explosions and loudness.
The film is so visually and aurally overpowering that I quickly had no idea what the hell was happening in the story. The action sequences are poorly rendered to the point of confusion. Shots are fired, people are killed, but I didn’t know where the shooters were in relation to the characters that were shot. Every bullet seems to cause an explosion of some sort, causing a lot of noise and a lot of confusion. I quickly stopped caring who was shooting and who was being shot. At the end of each action sequence, I just had to take a mental inventory of who was still alive. Why characters were dead and how they died no longer mattered. My goal was to not go insane watching a film that desperately wanted to steal my sanity.
By the end, my mind was mush. I could barely remember where I was, alone what happened in the last two hours. So, when the film tries to tease a sequel, it took me a good ten minutes to remember what the last thirty seconds of the film meant. That plot point was lost in the haze of gunfire and running.
The main set piece is in Paris where the “Joes” are racing against the bad guys whom are trying to use their shoulder-mounted nanotechnology rockets to destroy the Eiffel Tower. Duke and Ripcord wear these super-human speed suits to chase down the bad guys. The special effects, in this and every scene, are terrible, but it’s a curious sequence because of something that happened earlier in the film. In our opening ambush scene, the movie introduces us to a gun that has a camera on it. The bad guy holding the gun can rewind the tape and target anyone within the lens’ reach with a single rocket. He fires a rocket at a single U.S. Soldier, a waste of firepower indeed. It speaks to the short attention span of the film when the same technology cannot be deployed against the Eiffel Tower. It can be seen anywhere in the city, just lock-on and go, but then the film wouldn’t have an excuse to blow a lot of stuff up.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt tells Leonard Maltin in the interview that “G.I. Joe” isn’t a movie that’s “meant to be thought about it afterwards” and that viewers could just “carry on with your afternoon.” While Gordon-Levitt is the easily the best part of this film; I disagree. I’m not wired to sit in a theater, slack-jawed and drooling, and afterwards move on about my business. After a movie, I tend to process what I just saw, analyze how it made me feel, and make a decision on if I liked what I saw. If I talk to a friend about a movie, I’d like to tell them if I had a good experience or a bad experience, not just that I had the experience.
But I know what Joseph is getting at, that the movie isn’t meant to be taken seriously and that it should just be a good time. With that in mind, a film shouldn’t just cater to those of us who see pretty explosions and think they’ve seen a good movie. It still should make sense. It still should render some thought in the viewers, even if it’s the most minor of synapses firing. A good action movie both provides our central nervous system with the tingle of excitement, while giving our brain something that lives on long after the lights go up. By this benchmark, “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” fails miserably.
With that, I go back to agreeing with Mr. Gordon-Levitt, an actor whom I admire and cannot wait to see what he does next, when he said in the same interview, “G.I. Joe’ makes ‘Third Rock from the Sun’ look like a Cassevetes movie.”
I couldn’t agree more, sir. I couldn’t agree more.
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