Movie Review: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (Rating: 3/5)

This film is about an elite special force trying to stop a group of terrorists, who wants to control the world, by creating chaos using their advanced weaponry.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is inspired by Hasbro's famous line of plastic action figures. The main story of the film is about an evil weapons-manufacturing company, who developed an advanced nano-technology, which can “eat up” everything built with metal (like tanks or even the Eiffel Tower). The terrorists planned to hit the world’s major cities with this new weapon and to control the world as a result. The “Joes” (as what the soldiers of G.I. Joes called themselves) were fighting to stop their plan.

Frankly, I was not expecting this film to have any kind of story, because everybody understands this kind of summer action movie is not there to win any Oscar Awards on best picture or best screenplay, it is there to give us (the viewers) all the actions and thrills. But to my surprise, it actually had a main plot and provided some background stories on the main characters. Although there are quite a bit of holes in the plots (I will talk about that in a minute), I still appreciate the intention of developing a story for the film.

Onto the best aspect of the film – the actions scenes. There are two main action sequences in the film. First one is the Joes chasing the terrorists down the streets in Paris, and the second one is the underwater battle at the very end of the film. Personally, I prefer the street chasing sequence, because I think it is more interesting to see the CG (computer graphics) layering on a real location with real people running around. Although the CG in this sequence is not as good and fluid as those in the other similar movies such as Transformers or even Spider-Man, I think the editing/directing did a good job to capture all the significant moments, so you can still feel all the excitements. Also, there are a lot of great high tech hardwares in the film, and they are really cool to look at. For instance, I would love to have that plasma gun, not the warplane-mounted version, but the hand-held one. Nothing is better than being able to blast several soldiers into walls with just one single shot. (Oops. I guess I just raise this review from a G to an R rating according to MPAA)

Back to the weaker parts of the film. As I mentioned previously, the plots did have several flaws. The most serious one was about how a normal good solider suddenly decided to join the evil company, and even to involve his beloved sister against her will. The film did try to give an explanation, but I don’t think anyone can be convinced by that. The other flaw comes to mind was the Ninja character. I believe the only reason to have this character is to help Hasbro selling more of its action figures in Japan. I mean, looking at all the extremely advanced weapons introduced in the film, a Ninja character using just swords and shunkens (the star-shaped dart used by Ninja) just doesn’t fit by any means. Regarding to the cast performances, since most of the screen time is spent on the action scenes, to be fair, the cast do not really have a chance to show any significant performances.

In fact, lots of other reviews are giving this film a pretty low rating, but at least they all agree it is better than Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. And having said all that, I still think this film did the job of providing an entertaining and thrilling experience. The action sequences were great, even though there are definitely rooms for improvements on the CGs. And the story had problems, but I don’t think it gets in the way for you to enjoy the rest of the film.

By the way, for those of you who already watched the film, I think we all agree that we are expecting a sequel or even a trilogy coming soon.