I am struggling with how I feel about this movie and trying to determine if I liked it because it was good (or at least had a lot of good elements) or if is simply because it was nearly impossible for it to be worse than the first movie. In some ways I feel about this movie the way I feel about the Transformers' movies; I love seeing my childhood passions brought to life and loved seeing the massive robots beating the crap out of one another, but pretty much everything else was horrific. I feel the same about GI Joe. Seeing Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow fight (and there was a lot more of it than I was expecting) was absolutely awesome and my inner child was cheering, but much of the rest of the movie was just painful.
Some observations:
- Channing Tatum couldn't act his way out of a paper bag. If part of the reason for the delay of the release of this movie was to add more footage of him, that was completely wasted.
- RZA can't act period. He was absolutely painful to watch.
- The first ten minutes or so of the movie were dreadful and made me think we were going to see the first film all over again. Then it gets darker and better.
- Lots of completely unnecessary exposition that is distracting and spoonfeeds you the story.
- The costumes in the first film were great. The costumes in this film are even better (outside of Storm Shadow's Michael Jackson inspired jacket). Snakes Eyes finally looks like Snake Eyes! Cobra Commander looks like a badass. The Joes look more realistic. Great stuff!
- Everything dealing with ninjas, the Arashikage (with RZA being the only exception) and Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow was just awesome and worth going to see the film alone. These parts were pure movie magic and childhood dreams come to life.
- Walter Goggins should be in more films. Even though he has a relatively small part, he was awesome.
- Jinx was not nearly as bad as I expected and was the perfect partner for Snake Eyes although there is one odd moment between them I didn't understand.
- Lady Jaye steps squarely into the position of Scarlett from the first film and even has some of Scarlett's attitude. It is a shame that members like Scarlett aren't referenced at all. They just don't seem to exist in this movie.
- I love Bruce Willis, but his character is poorly written and serves very little purpose in the movie. It feels like he wanted to be in a GI Joe movie, so they just crammed a character into the story line for him.
- Thankfully, there is no painful love story in this movie. There is a glimpse of a love interest, but they didn't push it at all, which was really nice.
Overall, the movie was a little disjointed for me and it felt like I was watching scenes written by different people, some good and some not so good. I walked out relatively satisfied but primarily because my favorite character, Storm Shadow, got a lot more screen time than expected, had a character arc, and was handled nearly perfectly (as was Snake Eyes). Outside of that, it was a bit of a mixed bag.
SPOILER:
At the end of the movie, I walked out and realized that in 3 minutes, Cobra managed to accomplish what we hadn't accomplished in decades; the complete nuclear disarmament of the world. While their intentions were not good, can you really call them bad guys since they accomplished this feat with relative ease?