MOVIE REVIEW: G.I. JOE: RISE OF COBRA

This has been the movie I was most curious about seeing all summer, not what I was looking forward to, just curious about. When I first heard they were doing G.I. Joe, I was pretty pumped. Most guys my age watched the cartoon and had the toys so who wouldn't be excited. Then it was back and forth from there. I heard Stephen Sommers (who I hate) was doing it so I lost excitement, then I saw the pictures of all the characters and I got a little optimistic, then here comes the trailer. The trailer for this film, is one of the worst trailers I have seen for a movie. I immediately lost all hope for the film. So then Paramount does something I think is very smart. They only let the fanboy critics screen the movie, guys from sites like Aintitcoolnews.com, and joblo.com. And all of these guys start going on about how the movie is not perfect, but fun and actually pretty enjoyable. Before its release it was at 91% on rottentomatoes. Paramount did this because critics and the Internet has gotten so negative, it can sometimes kill a movie before it even gets a chance. So here is what I thought of the film.

Like most of the fanboy critics said, this is not a perfect film, and it has many flaws, but this was a very fun and enjoyable film. G.I. Joe is a specialized military group who take on evil arms dealer groups, a pretty simple premise. This story revolves around the Joe's trying to prevent a mysterious Cobra organization from stealing new nano robotic missiles that destroy anything and everything until a kill switch has been hit. Like I said, there were many ups and downs to the film so here is what I liked and disliked.

I loved the gadgets in this film. At one point I thought to myself, how can they possibly come up with anymore gadgets for this. The Pit, the Joe's base, was awesome. It literally had everything, I want to go back just to check it out again because so much was going on. I was very surprised at the violence in this film. A lot of PG-13 movies goes soft on the violence, like Transformers, but they were putting swords through stomachs and arrows through faces and I love that, especially since no one in the cartoon ever got hurt. And finally Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow were pretty freakin awesome.

As for stuff I didn't like, the first ten minutes were pretty bad and my hopes were very low for the film. I thought that the dialogue was very cheesy in parts although, I think they were just trying to take that from the series. I also thought the CGI was pretty bad in some parts like when they show the desert shot of The Pit. Now I'm not going to totally bash the cast, but obviously this could have been casted a little better. I hate Channing Tatum but I didn't hate him during this whole movie, just in parts. I think they could have done better but I'm not complaining too much. The Snake Eyes/Storm Shadow back story was horrible. It was probably my least favor part of the film. And finally the love stories. There were two separate love stories going on and I really just thought we could have done without that.

I did like this movie, it was fun, entertaining, and definitely action packed. I'm looking forward to seeing this again and looking forward to the sequel, so I'm going to give this four out of five. Good job Sommers, much better than Van Helsing.