The Case for Cobrafication

Hasbro has had a resurgence lately: the iconic toy manufacturer from the 1980s has taken its best selling products from that decade, updated and CGI’d them, and thrown these reimaged images up on screen with some live action actors and made some “big screen event” movies.

On the heels of the Transformers reboot comes the reinvention of G I Joe, from jingoistic American military propaganda machine to jingoistic NATO military propaganda machine. In the G I Joe world, large weapons and heavily armed futuristic vehicles reign supreme, utilised by men and women at the peak of physical perfection, serving the black and white causes of good (G I Joe) or evil (Cobra/M.A.R.S.) and protecting the real estate of the world from harm and destruction (civilians kind of get in the way).

There are no pretensions at real depth in G I Joe, though there are some fairly risible attempts at something called “acting”. Someone somewhere decided some of the characters required a modicum of fleshing out, and then someone else somewhere else decided that some of that fleshing could be done through talking and emoting. Luckily the “someone else somewhere else” was given very little credence, as most “fleshing” is done through flashback fight scenes and minimal dialogue which keeps in line with the main film. The attempts at real emotion are mercifully short, with even the actors realising nobody really wants to see that sort of thing going on in this sort of movie.

And they chose some perfect actors for the main parts. Dennis Quaid shouts his few lines of dialogue as General Hawk in his most manly, hands on hips pose, with Christopher Eccleston doing more or less the same for the other side; Joseph Gorden-Levitt makes a bold departure from quality indie film roles to embrace his inner 2 dimensional character acting skills; square-jawed Channing Tatum plays wooden perfectly as the buff and heroic Duke (though he can still Step Up and dance when need be); and Brendan Fraser makes a baffling 2 minute cameo as an unmotivating instructor (or perhaps he was just a random Joe?) that had me yearning for Sergeant Zim to appear and stab a knife into the back of my hand. With that much testosterone flowing around, as well as the extra barrels of testosterone of the other cast members, perhaps it is not surprising that the film can at times be nauseatingly macho.

But the star of the show is the action, and there is lots of it. Tranformers 2 suffered from the fact it was mainly people running around and talking, whereas G I Joe sticks to the formula that if it ain’t broke, blow it up. And considering the story moves around the world fairly rapidly, there is a lot that is not broken – well, until the Joes get there.

Of course, the story makes little to no sense: the Joes’ base would be rendered useless if a big sandstorm raged across the Sahara; one would think amongst the multi billion Euro M.A.R.S. underwater facility and associated vehicles and weapons that the Cobra Finance division would have been able to set a wee bit aside for at least one nuclear warhead or other weapon of mass destruction; and I doubt that the urban planners would ever really allow a kilometres long particle accelerator in the middle of Paris. But why quibble when G I Joe obviously knows that it is bollocks (not that I think the film, or any of the characters, are actually self aware), and just has fun with it?

And had fun with it I did as well. There were few boring moments, though some of the action scenes were quite hard to follow (the accelerator suits shown in the ads are as rubbish as they seem), and things kept rolling and exploding along from beginning to end. Not a good or remarkable film by any stretch of the imagination, but it hit an action spot that Transformers 2 failed to press, and in that respect, I enjoyed it immensely.

Verdict: No longer just a Real American Hero, now more a Real Coalition-of-the-Willing Hero, G I Joe leaps from the plastic to the live action in an explosive bound, bypassing anything to do with the complexities of reality and international politics in the process, all in pursuit of an evil foe to prove the Joes’ goodness. 6 nanobot missiles out of 10.