4/27/2023 0 Comments Gi joe snake eyes![]() ![]() The problem isn't that Snake Eyes departs from classic G.I. But I'm not not saying it either.)Īnd even people who have fond memories for the mail-in Cobra Commander doll and his Cobra Missile Command Headquarters- a Sears exclusive! -probably won't find much to love in the movie's depiction of the Joes, who are hurriedly described as "an elite global counter-terrorism network" and "the good guys" and then rather haphazardly integrated into the swords-and-bro-feelings movie. Joe and Transformers taught a generation of boys theory of mind. (I'm not saying the 1980s iterations of G.I. Joe elements creep in during the second half, the movie becomes more of a conventional blockbuster, a ninja-gizmo melodrama with ho-hum stakes and characters you could only care about if-and I'm just hypothesizing here-you spent hours upon hours as a child during the Reagan era imagining the psychologically sophisticated inner lives of cheap plastic gun-Barbies. It's a fun beat, and the movie could have used more of them. The action sequences aren't quite great, but the best ones have a playful energy to them one early sequence ends with our hero, Snake Eyes (Henry Golding), and his battle buddy/feelings bro, Tommy Arashikage (Andrew Koji), in the cab of a cargo truck, surrounded by a dozen-plus swords, all of which have just barely missed them. Joe film at all: Instead, it's a half-competent martial arts picture, the sort of movie where most conflicts are resolved with swords and jump kicks. And for the first hour, you'd hardly know this was a G.I. Joe Origins" is tacked on in tiny letters at the bottom. ![]() "Snake Eyes" is rendered in large, menacingly cool red while "G.I. This is the sort of film where you can tell a lot just by the font sizes in the logo. In the space of about five minutes, I scribbled the following quotes in my notebook: "If your heart is pure, our secrets will reveal themselves to you." "You have that look you get sometimes-a shadow before a storm." "A win without honor is no win at all." Sadly, very little in this movie revealed itself to me. The dialogue ranges from clever quips to exposition dumps to content-free koans, the sort of poetic pseudo-philosophy that sounds like it means everything, because it means nothing. Also, there are hard bros with pent-up feelings, and giant snakes and a mystical fire talisman and, lest you think you've had enough, still more motorcycles and swords, some of which are pretty cool. But I have to admit: It's affably dumb, pleasantly stupid, the kind of movie that may not know much but knows just enough not to ask too much of you, except that you enjoy some cool sword fights and cooler motorcycles. Who in the world was crying out to learn the deep backstory of a 1980s Hasbro cartoon for sugar-addled six-year-old boys just home from school and desperate to watch quasi-militarized comic-booky good guys fight goofy international terrorist baddies hellbent on non-specific world domination? This was a dingbat plot-okay, a successful dingbat plot-to sell tiny plastic Barbie dolls with guns to American elementary school boys, fercryinoutloud, not a richly imagined, morally complex fantasy epic for adults meant to sell something culturally important, like streaming service subscriptions. Joe, the crappy old cartoon series about an elite force of blah blah blahs fighting a villainous group of whoever the hell now, has bills to pay and endless speedruns of old Nintendo games to watch. Joe Origins ? Really? Every child fan of G.I. Joe Origins is a dumb movie with a dumb name based on a dumb idea.
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