G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero

[vynsane]

now dashed upon the rocks of... i dunno, the shore of the ocean of shittiness?

Jersey?

Dude, raggin' on Jersey?! Even Jersey shouldn't be closely associated with the turd that will be this movie.

hahaha.... jersey smells funny.

If the movie had no association to G.I. Joe it probably wouldn't be horrible, but the fact that they are trampling on an iconic story just ruins it all.

i don't know about that, it looks like it would be pretty crappy either way... though it looks as though they're trying to make 'GIJoe' into '24' with matrix moves and ninjas.

[anarky]

Okay, I hate to sound conspiracy theorist, but "listen" to this.

The film has been supposedly receiving the worst prescreening ratings of ANY film Paramount has ever produced. As in ever. Considering some of the shit they're responsible for, that's bad.

Fans universally seem uninspired, at the least. Even grownups who barely remember GIJoe aren't seeing the connection.

Here's where it gets a little odd, in my opinion.

Hasbro unveiled Resolute last year at conventions, hoping to build interest in the franchise prior to the movie. Based on the short preview and some character design images, it was getting more hype among fans than the movie. They buried it at 12AM on a Saturday on Adult Swim with barely two weeks notice. It was very well-received. They have actually removed the series from both the adultswim.com and gijoeresolute.com sites. They refuse to answer non-stop questions about a DVD release.

Aside from some distribution problems ("Really, everyone will want a 'Scarlett as pilot' figure from Argentina even though she was not a pilot in the US!") and overpriced exclusives, the 25th Anniversary line has sold like gangbusters. There are some major pegwarmers, but how many Major Bludds have you seen? Barbecues? Mutts? Except for the guys (and gals) who simply were overproduced, it's been moving quite well. So they cancel several confirmed figures (Monkeywrench, several flavors of Viper, a few Night Force repaints) to put them on movie cards as "off-camera" movie figures.

So kill interest in the successful Resolute, kill the successful Anniversary line and put some figures and vehicles in movie packaging to get collectors to buy at least some movie figures. With me so far?

Both Transformers movies had major blitzes of merchandise with a hard release date. With GIJoe, there was a release date. Then they moved it up a week. Then another week. Then they finally said, "Eh, just put 'em out sometime around the 4th of July." Some stores have merchandise. Others don't. The merchandise is a few 12" figures, two waves of 3.75" figures, a few vehicles, and Combat Heroes. Nothing else. Not even t-shirts.

The way the marketing of this movie is being handled, I really think, despite their claims to the contrary (they're still obligated to hype it), everyone involved knows they have a stinker and likely bomb on their hands. They're trying to minimize losses by keeping everything as low-key as possible.

Sound logical to y'all, or am I batshit insane? Okay, I'm batshit insane anyway, but does it sound logical?

[vynsane]

logical: their reasoning, or yours?

if the later, yes. if the former, batshit insane, because it's as if they don't want to diversify their ability to make money. or to make money at all.

[Ran]

I've managed to avoid most of the GI Joe movie hype so far, but I just saw a commercial for it on TV. When they said "From the Director of The Mummy", you had to know it would be bad. Are they wearing some sort of cyborg suits? Yeah, it is a dumb idea, but it is sort of realistic. The Army gave money to MIT to develop some sort of exo-suit to allow soldiers to jump farther, etc. The movie has to be a flop, even though Baroness still looks hot.

[anarky]

More than a week after the release date, and no WM's near me have any toys. None of the TRU's, either. Well, okay, TRU looked like they'd put out one case of figures, but none of the vehicles that actually were in their circular this week! There are two I want (fairly generic Cobra vehicles--a jet copter and Hummer that don't have too much movie styling on them--with repaints of Wild Weasel as drivers), and I thought about getting a raincheck, but their service is so incompetent I doubt I'd have any luck even with a raincheck. I sucked it up and asked my mom to get them for me, since she works across the street from a TRU. I hate asking my parents to get toys, but they're the only people I even halfway trust to find the right thing, and I don't have to pay shipping (which would negate the $5/vehicle savings).

[Diabolical]

Whatshisname at SSG that always posts toy reviews from his own site reviewed Baroness and the figure looks pretty good in the pics.

[anarky]

The faces on all the Baroness figures are shit in person, though.

[Ran]

I've seen the toys in the store. The only ones I looked at were Stormshadow and Snake Eyes. They had their regular weapons that you'd expect GI Joes to have, then there was one huge missle launching weapon that probably bigger than the figure

[anarky]

Apparently, the Baroness is mind-controlled by her brother, and is really a good guy, and will be a Joe in the second movie, God unwilling. I am not fucking making this up.

[Diabolical]

So I saw GI Joe tonight.
It was the trainwreck I imagined
And it was beautiful.

The story sucked (and made little-to-no sense), the acting sucked and there was cheese everywhere.
I shook my head head and said "Oh, Jesus Christ..." far too many times to count.

It succeeded where Transformers failed - in being fairly entertaining. Tranformers was cheesy, but boring and confusing. GI Joe was cheesy and stupid, but watchable.

Also, Scarlett and Baroness are crazy hot.

SPOILERS OF STUPIDITY...if anyone cares.

Of course there is a "life-like hair" and "kung-gu grip joke (courtesy of Marlon Wayans to boot!)
---
The movie opens (after a pointless prologue in the 1600's) with the words "In the not too distant future..." so naturally the movie takes place Next Sunday A.D.
---
Baroness is indeed being mind-controlled by the Doctor (AKA future Cobra Commander, AKA her brother Rex - and she has no fucking clue). She finally fights off the mind-control to save Duke at the last second. Baroness then gets knocked out (or something) and the second she wakes up, her and Duke start making out (giving Destro and The Doctor more time to escape) because all the trying to kill each other stuff is apparently forgiven just like that.
---
The climax takes place in MARS' (pre-Cobra) underwater Arctic base. As the (soon to be) Cobra Commander and Destro flee, Cobra Commander sets of numerous bombs in the ice above that sends massive chucks of ice down on top of the station, destroying it in the process. Scarlett, Snake Eyes and Breaker are still inside the base as it's being destroyed.
How do they get out?

They take the elevator.
Naturally.

[jjreason]

So much of it sucked that I have to say the movie sucked. Hawk's uniform alone made it suck.... but it did have some redeeming qualities.

I thought the fact that CC was the Baroness' brother who was supposed to be dead (like another Rex we know) was a very good twist. Surprised the heck out of me even. I thought the Snake Eyes/Stormshadow sub-plot was dealt with adequately - and that a sequel fleshing this out could be a better movie. The fact that there was a wicked underwater battle more than counterbalanced the crappy snowsuits. A cool underwater climactic battle has been due for some time.

Unfortunately I chose to take Thomas to see this, at 7yrs of age. Much of it was just way too intense for him, from the language to the pace of the fights to the needles in the face... just too much, so I wound up covering his eyes a few times during the show. I'll know the difference between pg and pg14 better next time I guess.

[anarky]

PG14? We've got PG-13 here. Wonder why that is. Not being sarcastic, but, seriously, wonder why someone decided to go a year different than their closest geographical and cultural neighbor? (Not saying it was Canada; I've no idea which came first.)

[jjreason]

Weird, in checking it says straight PG - with the caption about language and violence type thing. Not sure where I came up with PG14 - we have 14A here which is the next step up - which is where this movie should have fallen in my opinion.

[anarky]

Well, I saw it yesterday. I have to admit, it wasn't nearly as bad as I expected. There was some real potential there, as well as some WTF plot holes and horrific acting, but, overall, I think it probably deserved something between a D and C-.

Some thoughts:

The script: Not Transformers bad, but so full of holes that we had to fight off mice who mistook it for Swiss cheese.

Destro: Very well acted, I thought, for the most part. I liked the flashback, and the portrayal. He was a nasty sumbitch. My big issue was the whole motive thing. He makes these nanomite warheads, is shipping them through the desert, accompanied by American troops despite his company being Scottish and his base being in the Arctic (huh?), then steals them from himself, insisting NATO must be to blame, so that he can take them to his undectable base under the ice and shoot them at nations to take control of the world? Why not just not tell anyone about them, blow up some shit, and then demand control of the world, cut out the middleman? Also, his whole finale sequence was dumb and pointless.

Baroness: She looked the part. I'll give her that. That's about all the credit I'll give her. Sienna Miller deserves a Razzie for this role. I think the worst was a sentence fairly early on, where every word was in a different accent.

Duke: Surprisingly, not too bad. On his own, Channing did a fine job, and Duke was the closest thing to a strong character on the side of the angels here. Unfortunately, there's....

The whole triangle thing: Stupid. But it actually could've worked, had it been slightly more plausible. Rex suddenly becoming evil for no real reason, Duke dumping Baroness for no real reason, Rex brainwashing her for no real reason, the insanely stupid reconciliation at the end, Christ, it was painfully bad.

Cobra Commander: Fuck, I'll come right out and admit it: Joseph Gordon Levitt needs to kick Stephen Sommers in his tiny nuts. The guy took a steaming pile of shit, and turned it into gold. (The Rex Lewis role, not the film as a whole--even he wasn't that good.) I guess that's what happens when you hire a guy who's actually a fucking good actor to play a major role. Well, maybe not always, since Turturo and Voight sucked balls in Transformers. He was goofy, corny, and actually pretty damned scary at the same time. He might not've been an insane former used car salesman, or a half-snake scientist with a million eyes, but he was still Cobra Commander.

Vipers: Let me get this straight: you've got these badass motherfuckers with (almost) totally impenetrable armor and badass laser guns, and you give them crazy sci-fi treatments to make them impervious to pain and self-healing, making them even more badass, but then you totally waste them? Huh? And why 19 rather than an even 20? It made no sense. They actually did look pretty good, though.

Storm Shadow: May as well not have been there. He was pretty superfluous, and one thing Storm Shadow should never be is superfluous. They should've saved him for a sequel. And why didn't he have a Japanese accent, if this version was supposed to be Japanese instead of from Fresno?

Snake Eyes: Somewhere, Jesus watched this movie and cried. They turned the baddest motherfucker in all of fiction into, well, a fucking mime. Because he didn't talk, and he was a clown. Even with Ray Park under the suit, he never seemed dangerous, just silly.

Hawk: Someone shoot Dennis Quaid already. Really. The guy was worthless. The acting was shit, and the character a pussy who couldn't do anything other than wave his dick around. I don't care if he's got essentially a desk job, he's the leader of the fucking Joes. He shouldn't get beaten up like a little bitch in his only action scene.

The Joe team: Ridiculous. They've got to be the most ineffectual, worthless "best of the best" team ever. C'mon, they can't even put alarms on their fucking secret underground base that don't require manual activation? And every single goddamned one of them off the so-called "Alpha Team" was pointless. This could've been a great way to put some cool cameos in there. As it was, we got fucking Brendan Fraser playing some dumbass made-up piece of shit who they might as well have called Flint, since he was fucking Flint with a new, more snigtarded, name.

Breaker: Not too bad. Aside from Duke, the only Joe team member who didn't deserve to be kicked in the balls. Unfortunately, he was a fucking moron (how the fuck do you know to turn off a tracer at one point, then forget it exists?), and his technology sometimes too stupid to be plausible. ("Hey, want to watch the latest episode of 'What This Dead Viper Saw'?")

Heavy Duty: Window dressing, and barely even that. It's ridiculous that the writers claimed that the practically nonexistent character of Heavy Duty "resonated" more with them than Roadblock, since the guy's so one-dimensional they could've called him Silly Sally and it wouldn't have mattered a bit.

Scarlett: Damn. God damn. Take that two ways. One, she was fucking hot. I'll give her that. Two, she was so fucked up and unrecognizable, they shouldn't have bothered. Scarlett is no naive idiot, any more than Baroness is a good guy with some computer shit in her head. I have to admire her crossbow, so powerful it can instantly kill Vipers who are totally impervious to all other known weapons. But she needed to turn down the volume a bit. That beeping noise was silly.

Ripcord: Someone with the power to do so needs to require Damon and Keenan Ivory Wayans, in character as the Men on Film, to beat the shit out of their brother. Ripcord was fucking stupid, and unfunny jokes by Wayans the whole goddamned time made him slightly less bearable than Jar Jar Binks. And why was a fucking guy with no connection at all to paratroopers called "Ripcord"?

Ripcord + Scarlett: Not sure whether to be disgusted by this or not. Scarlett wasn't cool enough to care about, and Ripcord sucked balls. They suck enough for one another. Maybe. The nonexistent plot wasn't clear on whether they end up together.

Zartan: Why bother? There was not a single point in the movie, aside from the laughably dumb finale, that he served any purpose whatsoever. The guy playing him actually seemed okay, it's just that Zartan was such a small and pointless role, it's tough to tell.

Mindbender: This, I liked, even if it made no sense for a guy who's not obviously wacked out of his fucking gourd to have a name like Mindbender. This was the only real easter egg for fans in a movie that could've been chock full of them.

Overall, it's not a good movie. But it's not horrible. I didn't feel like I saw a good film, I have no idea to see it again, but I don't feel like someone owes me two hours back. So it's a lot better than I expected. I'll keep reading the comics (old and new), and, I've got to admit, I might watch the inevitable sequel just to see Levitt trying to singlehandedly save another pile of shit.

[Diabolical]

GI Joe was trainwreck close to Transformers proportions, except I wasn't angry when I finished it. I had a lot of fun laughing at the ridiculousness of it all, rather that wanting to destroy things.

My two favorite characters were Baroness and Scarlett, because every character was absolutely terrible and the acting was beyond bad, but at least those two were great to look at.

Even Joseph Gordon Levitt, a really good actor, was so freakin' bad it was unbelievable.
Wacky black guy was pretty painful too.

My absolute favorite part was how Snake Eyes, Scarlett and...the other guy...escaped the Cobra/whatever base. "This whole fortress is collapsing! Giant ice chunks are falling and tearing the place apart! Hey look, an elevator tube!"