Screenhead

I’m not sure, exactly, why the folks behind G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra felt the need to keep this one out of the critics’ hands.  You’ll find out why in just a second.

First, the plot.  Someone apparently took the Patriot Act WAY too far and built a clandestine team of highly-powered and extraordinarily well-equipped soldiers from around the world (I don’t even want to think about how much international law THAT maneuver breaks).  And frankly, it’s a good thing they did, because they find themselves facing a nearly-equally highly-powered and well-equipped force of terrorists / mercenaries / general bad guys.  There’s a lot more than that going on in here, but suffice it all to say that the plot can basically be reduced to “G.I. Joe is going to fight Cobra, much like it did back in your childhood”.  Though don’t expect this to look too much like your childhood–they have, of course, dispensed with canon.  Which kind of sucks–I WISH they’d kept Cobra Commander as a former used-car dealer turned mercenary.

Let’s be clear–this is NOT an Oscar contender.  This is Short Attention Span Theatre at its absolute zenith.  I didn’t think to bring a stopwatch with me but something or someone will get shot / blown up / stabbed / sliced / run over with alarming frequency.  The movie is essentially one long fight scene occasionally broken up by dialogue.  Sometimes the two will even overlap, causing a kind of plot development and backstory.

In the strictest sense, this really isn’t that great a movie.  It has precious little story to it, and doesn’t really challenge the viewer in any way. This may well be why no one wanted critics there–so that they couldn’t go on any diatribes (like this) about how the film community is basically out to turn the world, in a truly Cobra Commander style plot (double bonus irony points! Woo hoo!). into a legion of mindless sheep by feeding them a steady diet of crap.

Basically, they could’ve titled this movie “Violence!” and no one would’ve noticed a difference, nor likely cared.

But that was the point.  This is just a fun movie, something you go see for an adrenaline rush and to watch hot chicks fight and see stuff blow up on a regular basis.  It’s quite possibly the new gold standard of “popcorn movie”.  This movie might well appear in a dictionary entry next to the phrase “aggressive mediocrity”.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale awards it a seven out of ten for doing EXACTLY what it set out to do and nothing more.  In the grander sense, it’s a C-student–make no mistake about that–but it’s definitely the BEST C-student ever.  There’s nothing wrong with this movie–but there’s not as much right as there could have been, either.