Okay - didn't see a thread on the front page here, and didn't want to revive something from past July 8th, so here goes.
I went to see this movie on opening day, with some trepidation I will admit.
GI Joe was just about my very favorite cartoon when I was a kid - I saw all the 'mini-marathons' and the movies, even read the comics, where they met up with the Transformers at one point. I was definitely a GI Joe geek.
SPOILERS - so look away if you care to - last warning.
I was pleasantly surprised for the most part. The casting was pretty good - but then, even as a kid, I always thought of Hawk as being played by Dennis Quaid, so that was something I liked from the first trailer. The show followed a lot of the formula from the old cartoons - the bad guys attack the Joes' hidden base - leaving them all but down and out, and then the Joes' find out where the bad guys are hiding, and go attack their base. Turnabout is fair play, after all.
I do like how they waited until the very end to reveal who the Cobra Commander was, and in fact only hinted at the name 'COBRA' throughout the movie. No name was even given to the group at first.
I like how most of the characters are represented - but there is an exception, and I'll get to that in a minute. For the better part of the cast, the characters were true to their cartoon counterparts - and that was somewhat surprising, because I was sure they were going to just make them all the same, and that was completely against what GI Joe was all about. Wayans, in particular, is good because of the way he breaks things up. It's not his funniest work, but he does a good job of delivering the lines in the funniest way possible. Duke is stoic, and all about winning the mission, while rescuing the damsel in distress...
...which brings me to said damsel. This is the ONE thing that just absolutely pissed me the hell off. The Baroness was not EVER a good girl being manipulated to be bad. She was just as evil as the men around her, and just as bad. She reveled in it, and there was no, "Oh, I'm so sorry" uttered from her lips, unless it was sarcastic because she'd just killed someone's best friend, and was smirking about it.
The reason this gets under my skin so much, is that - frankly - she was the reason I ever started liking bad girls in black leather. There was just something about that look, and that accent, and the attitude. She was nasty sex on black heels, and she wasn't sorry for any of it. Now they've tamed her, and that just really chaps my ass. Oh well, I digress.
A lot of the plot is predictable, but then I expected that - so I guess it was predictable twice... Oh well.
It is definitely not going to win any awards, but as I said to a friend, "I didn't feel like I wasted my time. I was entertained, and that was the whole point."
I hope the Baroness kills the writer in his sleep for fucking with her, but that's strictly me. I'm sure most others won't care.
