One star. Rating: PG-13, for nonstop violence and occasional profanity
By Derrick Bang
This sorry excuse for a movie is
for folks who find the Transformer
series too intellectually stimulating.
 |
| Roadblock (Dwayne Johnson, foreground left) and his fellow Joes — from left, Lady Jaye (Adrianne Palicki), Snake Eyes (Ray Park) and Flint (D.J. Cotrona) — are running out of options, before the evil Cobra Commander and his minions start doing Very Bad Stuff to the world. Are we worried? Do we even care? |
Honestly, even in the realm of
dumb fluff, this new GI Joe entry is
impressively pathetic. Rarely has so much money been squandered, to such little
effect.
I’m surprised Rhett Reese and
Paul Wernick were brave enough to admit writing this dreck. The proverbial 10
chimpanzees with typewriters could have created something better. A random
episode of the kid-oriented Power Rangers
TV series has more dramatic heft.
Basing a movie series on a toy
line does not, of necessity, require all concerned to fashion the result for
undiscerning 5-year-olds. Any set of characters can be made captivating;
indeed, Reese and Wernick have the advantage here of some established
archetypes, just waiting for a bit of back-story.
But, clearly, that would have
been asking too much. Instead, we labor through flimsy expository scenes and
battle sequences that appear to have been assembled at random. I’ve no doubt,
if director Jon M. Chu had simply tossed the script pages into the air and
filmed them as they fell, that the result would have made more sense.
What we have, in fact, displays
the dumb plotting, wooden acting and lunatic dialogue that grace afternoon TV
soap operas, stitched Frankenstein-style to an A-production budget that
delivers plenty of golly-gee-wow special effects.
Actually, GI Joe: Retaliation is nothing but
special effects. This isn’t a movie; it’s a video game. And one that’s
thuddingly predictable and insufferably boring, at that.
This isn’t even bad enough to be
campy fun; it’s merely bad. When an actor of Jonathan Pryce’s stature, playing
the U.S. president, is forced to utter corn-pone dialogue such as “Send in the
Joes!” — and do it with a straight
face — we know the lunatics have taken over the asylum.
This is one of those narratives
that repeatedly has the actors tell
us what their characters are doing, or about to do, or have done ... because,
otherwise, it would be impossible to make sense of anything.
