Monday, 8 April 2013

GI JOE: Retaliation


I just watched GI Joe: Retaliation, and feel as stupid as anyone deserves to feel for going to see a movie with that title. However, I enjoyed GI Joe 1, so I had a reasonably good expectation that it was going to be more of the same. It wasn’t . If GI Joe was a small, functional family business, that did what was it was supposed to do without any pretensions to greatness, then GI Joe: Retaliation resembles an aggressive corporate takeover, where profit has been maximised and half the staff have been sacked (Dennis Quaid goes, as does Christopher Ecclestone, and several other of the more interesting cast members) and replaced with talentless corporate drones - Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, and Bruce Willis. I like Bruce Willis as much as anyone, but not if he’s just phoning his performance in for five minutes so they can put his name on the poster. Most lamentably, they’ve chucked most of the crazy sci-fi elements of the first movie overboard (nanobite robots! Invulnerable super-soldiers!  Accelerator suits!) and replaced them with boring gung-ho soldier antics (hooah!) Point to note: Channing Tatum dies in the first five minutes, so I don’t know why he’s on the poster. That’s not a spoiler, because they spoiled the film prior to releasing it.

No comments:

Post a Comment