Please note that this review contains spoilers.
Every summer a cry goes up. “Movies these days have been designed for ten year old boys with tiny attention spans!” they say. If you took one of these critics and asked them to create a parody of what they thought movie execs wanted, in between muttering “Then he joins two katana together to make a double katana,” and “So he covers his face in silver and renames him Destros,” they would have written the script to G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
GI Joe makes it work by using everything they can think of. When it gets a bit too silly, they add another trope to the mix and make it even sillier. Evil guy with a mask and monocle? Sure, but how about if we made him the brother of the main guy’s love interest? (I would love to recommend TV Tropes to you, but I’ve never known anyone to make it out of that site alive). It’s internally consistent and it makes perfect sense when it turns out the two ninja, one dressed in black and the other in while, have a shared history.
One has to disguise one’s love for these movies, of course. It’s appropriate to say, “While it didn’t shed any light on the mystery and existential nature of the human condition, it was in accordance with the way the trailers portrayed it.” You can’t say, “The fight scenes and explosions were really cool and that evil ninja in white was awesome!”
But GI Joe IS awesome. Not awesome as might be commonly understood to mean ‘very, very good,’ but awesome as in the moment The Doctor describes the way he’s injected a serum into a group of men to take away their sense of fear in order to turn them into an army of killing machines. Then he makes one stick his hand into a terrarium holding a king cobra, which bites the guy, but his body pushes out the poison. Then there’s another explosion, or something. See? AWESOME.
Incidentally, said awesome evil ninja (Byung-hun Lee) will turn up very soon in The Good, The Bad, The Weird a movie from South Korea which looks like it’s going to be… y’know… awesome. The release date for “GBW” in Japan is August 29th.
