Like Neon

I am a great lover of a well-made action movie. As a genre, I tend to set action films apart from the rest, because I strongly believe that the elements I use to judge them aren’t the same as those I use to test your average drama, comedy or even horror flick. Action films are all about the poetry of motion, and the particular, rare talent of moving a viewer without dialogue. The truly great action films propel that motion with a clever script, but the plot is rarely what the viewer remembers.

Growing up a kid in the Eighties, I loved Saturday morning cartoons. It was practically a weekly event in my household, and two of my absolute favorites were Transformers and G.I. Joe. The first Transformers movie ended up being the sort of nigh-perfect combination of action and nerdery I dream about, so you can imagine how excited I was for the recent release of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. The trailers had been vaguely dubious, but I was willing to chalk that up to iffy editing. Christopher Eccleston as a villain? Sign me up, please!

Being familiar with the oft-campy source material, I knew the thing wasn’t going to be Oscar-worthy, and walking into the theatre, I felt my expectations were more than reasonable. I wanted to be entertained, nothing more. I didn’t buy my ticket expecting high-brow, but rather simply to have fun. What I got was a movie whose potential was squandered on a director who seemed to not know quite what to do with it.

To be fair, Stephen Sommers is completely capable of directing a truly great action movie: He both wrote and directed The Mummy, which is one of my favorite action films of all time. Unfortunately, he also directed The Mummy Returns and Van Helsing, the first of which didn’t even manage to be a good action movie, and the second of which I’ve been trying to forget since I saw it.

Sommers’ weak direction is most apparent in the lesser known actors: Rachel Nichols, who was effervescent and memorable for her short scenes in Star Trek is uncomfortable in her own skin in Joe, and Channing Tatum comes across forced at best and wooden at worst, managing zero chemistry with Sienna Miller. Dennis Quaid should have added some stability to the newbie cast, but it felt like all of his scenes were phoned in.

That said, several of the more seasoned actors in G.I. Joe did manage to pull their weight (and a lot of the film) through questionable editing and a dodgy script. The aforementioned Eccleston and Miller gave predictably solid performances, as did Jonathan Pryce and Arnold Vosloo (Who was one of the few bright spots, and woefully underused). Joseph Gordon-Levitt went cartoon campy with Cobra Commander and pulled it off, bringing more of Joe’s roots to the film than anything else in it. Marlon Wayans gave a surprisingly stellar performance that would have been all the more impactful had it been supported by the proper post-production audio elements.

But we’re watching this movie for the action, right? Not the plot. So some of the actors weren’t as great as the others. Big deal.

That’s the trouble, though: You have to strike a balance. If your plot/acting/script/etc. doesn’t measure up, you’d better make up for it with your action sequences, and Joe didn’t.

Which isn’t to say that the action was bad, but rather poorly executed. We’ve established that I love action movies, and there were some moments when so much was going on, scenes cutting back and forth, that it was giving me a headache. It felt like Sommers had so much he wanted to do that he made no real choices and just shoved every bit of action in that he could. The result? A jumbled, ineffective mess, where none of the scenes make the impact they could if used properly.

Add onto all of this the stereotypical “pure-hearted white boy appropriates Asian culture only to be betrayed by same culture” ninja bullshit, and it’s like the racist cream on top of my disappointment pie.

Ultimately, G.I. Joe felt to me like nobody was really trying, from script to execution. Throw a bunch of fancy guns and a secret underwater military base in there and let the blockbuster hype machine sort out the rest. If the movie had been truly without hope, it wouldn’t be so bad, but there’s nothing worse than an opportunity squandered. It’s ironic that the film’s tagline is “When all else fails, they don’t.” Apparently that doesn’t apply to Stephen Sommers.