Box Office Back Issues: G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra (2009)

BOX OFFICE BACK ISSUES is a new feature here at the Movies Section of NerdSpan where we revisit the previous installments in a comic book movie franchise, in anticipation of the next adventure–a rummage through the metaphorical movie longbox.

Critics were generally pretty unkind to the inaugural big-screen, live action G.I. Joe adventure, The Rise Of Cobra, when it hit theatres back in the summer of 2009 (I took a few shots at it myself in a review for my pal Rachelle Goguen’s comic blog Living Between Wednesdays). Granted, there are a lot of things wrong with director Stephen (Van Helsing, The Mummy) Sommers’ portrayal of America’s daring, highly-trained special missions force, but upon revisiting the film in preparation for next week’s long-delayed sequel, Retaliation, I was reminded that a lot of the things that make The Rise Of Cobra such a stupid movie also happen to make it kind of stupidly enjoyable.

As the title suggests, The Rise Of Cobra is an origin story for the serpent-obsessed terrorist organization that the Joe team doggedly pursued in the Hasbro toy line, Sunbow cartoon series, and Marvel comic book throughout the 1980s. Cobra Commander is, at this point, a heavy-breathing, disfigured mad scientist (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, unrecognizable outside of a few flashback scenes), Destro is still just an arms dealer without a metal mask (played by former Doctor Who star Christopher Eccleston), and nobody is yelling out “COBRAAAAA!” quite yet. But it’s also an origin story for two new G.I. Joe recruits, Duke (Channing Tatum) and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans), a couple of badass soldiers who find themselves indoctrinated into the super-secret squad when the weapons caravan they’re protecting is attacked by high-tech bandits. The would-be warhead thieves are led by bespectacled bad girl The Baroness (Sienna Miller), whom Duke recognizes as his old flame, Anna. Weapons maker James McCullen, AKA Destro, is up to something involving Nanotech Missiles, Super-Soldiers, and a plot against the President of the United States (Jonathan Pryce). The organization that’s not quite yet Cobra is, at this point, still a division of McCullen’s M.A.R.S. cartel, an evil high-tech arms merchant based out of a cool undersea headquarters hidden below the Arctic ice. Determined to find out why Duke’s old girlfriend is now working with the terrorist organization, the two newest Joes are rushed through their training so they can fight alongside Scarlett (Rachel Nichols), Heavy Duty (Adewale Akkinuoye-Agbaje), Breaker (Said Taghmaoui), and silent ninja/fan favorite Snake-Eyes (Ray Park), all under the command of General Hawk (Dennis Quaid).

The Rise Of Cobra is at its best when it embraces its own silliness. The television and comic book incarnations of G.I. Joe were unapologetic action figure commercials, and the film doesn’t stray too far from the formula. Practically every other scene requires either the heroes or the villains to break out some kind of fancy new high-tech vehicle or weapon. In true soap-opera fashion, everybody has a past with everybody else; Duke and Anna/The Baroness were lovers once, Anna’s brother Rex was in Duke and Ripcord’s unit in Iraq and is now The Doctor/Cobra Commander, and, of course, Snake-Eyes and his opposite number Storm Shadow (Byung-Hun Lee) trained under the same ninja master as children (for any viewer who grew up a Joe fan, the battles between these two are a highlight, even with the costume designer’s bizarre choice to give Snake-Eyes’ mask molded rubber lips). Watching it again, I wished the filmmakers had gone even further, giving all the different Joes the distinctive, colorful, and totally impractical outfits their cartoon counterparts had worn instead of dressing them all in the same black generic body armor. After all, everything about the movie is pretty ridiculous already–why not just shrug and go for it?

This inability to commit to the sheer goofiness of its own existence is where The Rise Of Cobra inevitably falls short. Screenwriters Stuart Beattie, David Elliot, and Paul Lovett’s need to explain things like Destro’s iron mask and Cobra Commander’s convoluted personal history are a drag, and in a movie that should be aimed primarily at eight-year-olds, they’re also not really necessary. While we’re talking about that demographic, the film is surprisingly violent, and not in the cartoon’s everybody-parachutes-to-safety kind of way–people are constantly getting shot in the eye or stabbed in the face. It still manages to be fairly bloodless, but it’s a bit shocking to see in what is essentially a kids’ movie. You definitely sense the filmmakers trying to please everybody (in other words, make grownups feel less stupid about sitting through a two-hour action figure promotion), which is the inevitable result of spending nearly $200 million on a movie like this–to make back its budget, it has to basically be all things to all audiences, when it really should just be what it is. If you’re making a movie about super-ninjas, underwater bases, accelerator suits, and guys with names like Zartan and Dr. Mindbender, you might as well kiss mainstream respectability goodbye anyway. If nothing else, all the boring origin stuff has been dealt with in this movie, and now Retaliation is hopefully free to indulge in the cartoon foolishness that The Rise Of Cobra expended so much energy setting up.

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