G.I. Joe – Retaliation

Today we’re talking about the half reboot, half sequel to a movie in which an iceberg sinks in water, so we can skip the part where we discuss merit or quality.  G.I. Joe – Retaliation is garbage.  If you’re watching it for anything other than guilty pleasure you’re already wrong.  Go home and think about how terrible you are.  This movie doesn’t belong in your fancy country club, it belongs in the bum fighting ring that the valets are running out of the parking garage.  And as long as you’re guilty you might as well try to squeeze as much pleasure as possible out of it so the important question today isn’t whether or not Retaliation is good, it’s whether it’s awesomely dumb or just plain stupid.

 

There’s a really vague line between the two and man…this thing is just draped all the fuck over it.  If there’s one thing I can give G.I. Joe credit for, it’s that whether or not the end result is the good kind of bad all the ingredients for it to be that way are certainly there.  It was written by the duo behind Zombieland so there’s hope that at least some part of it will be clever.  It was also directed by John M. Chu, whom you’ll recognize either from his work on Step Up 2: The Streets or his inclusion on IMDB user tlev92’s lists, “directors i would love to see make a yugioh live action movie” and “directors that i look up too”

If credits like that weren’t enough to convince you, the folks behind G.I. Joe – Retaliation even brought in ringers.  I’ve already made my pro-Rock action movie stance very clear.  If I were trying to ‘fix’ a franchise after a commercially successful but passionately hated movie like G.I. Joe – The Rise of Cobra, the Rock is exactly the kind of person I would want to bring in.  Bruce Willis is just the icing on the cake.  All the pieces are in place for this a big dumb action movie, just how we like ‘em.  And there are certain points where G.I. Joe – Retaliation absolutely hits that mark.  About a third of the way through the movie, for instance, the writers clearly said “Fuck this main story, let’s do some shit with ninjas.”  The result is a smash cut to a blind ninja master played by none other than RZA talking about how honor needs to be avenged and justice served and a bunch of other bullshit and it’s all clearly an excuse for ninjas to have a sword fight while rappelling down a mountain.  It’s completely unnecessary to the plot and they could’ve easily cut it out, but then there wouldn’t have been a rappelling ninja sword fight.  That’s the sort the sort of thing that makes a bad movie fun.

There’s also way too many of the kind of moments that make a bad movie boring.  This isn’t exactly a hard PG-13, which is to be expected.  Still, watching shootouts that are carefully crafted to make it look like no one actually got hurt for an hour and half can wear on you.  It also spends a lot of time explaining what happened after the first movie and how the two are tied together.  That’s kind of frustrating because the whole fucking point of tagging the Rock in and changing directors is that the studio is admitting how shitty the first one was.  They wanted to keep making G.I. Joe movies because they’re a goldmine and they knew it was too soon for a Hulk-style reboot so they made this big show about how things were different now.  Then they went and shot a movie that references the first shitty movie all the way through.

This movie is no Fast 5, although that’s what it wants to be.  It’s just nowhere near as fun.  Watching Fast 5 is like watching a child stick legos up his nose.  It doesn’t matter that you’re supposed to build things with those pieces, because you’ve found something way cooler to do with them anyways.  G.I. Joe is more like watching your dad put together an Ikea table.  What makes a dumb movie awesome is a childish sort of glee.  G.I. Joe doesn’t have that – it’s failure by committee.  When I watch a bad movie like Fast 5 I enjoy it because the people who made it really cared about whether or not it was good.  It’s just that their idea of what makes a good movie is hilariously dumb.  G.I. Joe – Retaliation fails overall because a large group of people tried to imitate that in a way that guarantees financial success, which is tragically stupid. – DT