G.I. Joe: Retaliation

A Partially Educated Review of G.I. Joe: Retaliation

In which the original few asked for, gets a sequel that even less people asked for.

When Sienna Miller declines to appear in your film, alarms bells must surely start ringing, but when the majority of the people who willingly signed up for G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra decline to reprise their roles, you would have to be an idiot to realise that continuing to make that film is a good idea. It would appear then that Jon M. Chu is an idiot.

To be fair, there's a smattering of unambitious sense in making a sequel to The Rise Of Cobra, as you're following a bona fide hack job that it would be incredibly hard to make anything worse than. …Cobra was legitimately devoid of anything approaching decency and also managed to look far cheaper than a $175 million budget should ever allow a film to look. While G.I. Joe: Retaliation is better than it's predecessor, it's in the exact same way that diarrhoea is better than dysentery.

Low intelligence isn't something you can throw as an insult at Retaliation. It's like criticising porn for lacking subtlety. The thing is, switching your brain off only works if the film is actually any fun and Retaliation is just one long infliction of narcoleptic drudgery upon the viewer. Any scenes with the remotest (emphasised) element to fun in them are done within the first 10 minutes, awkwardly and blatantly placed in to try and give the characters some humanity. The problem with this is that as soon as the proverbial hits the fan, they instantly go back into "dull hero" mode. Dwayne Johnson (or The Rock if you would prefer, and I do!) has seemingly forgotten how to act. You may scoff at the notion that he ever learnt, but that would be a little unfair. Johnson has got better as time has gone along, but in Retaliation, he's Scorpion-King-bad.

Fortunately for him, he's far from the worst thing about it. I know you're expecting Bruce Willis' name to appear here, but the guy's engaging in his favourite pastime of cashing a cheque and nothing more. For once, it appears he knows how awful he is. Honourable mention must also go to Ray Stevenson, who comes close to taking the crown with his turn as Firefly. Setting his face to mean, Stevenson adopts an accent that has never existed in the existence of ever. An accent so bad it's almost enough to serve as a recommendation of the film.

Almost.

The champion though is RZA in his brief, but laughably memorable turn as the mysterious figure known only as Blind Master. We know he's mysterious, because RZA puts on his mysterious voice, but he's making Byung-hun Lee look phenomenal and Byung-hun Lee is every bit as wooden as he was in the first one.

Speaking of which, I know we shouldn't be embracing reality and sense too much with the G.I. Joe series, but am I wrong, or do I distinctly remember Lee's Storm Shadow dying at the end of the first one? Instead of coming up with some ridiculous reason that would negate that death, the script seems to ignore it in the hope that we've forgotten. Sadly, the mental scars that film inflicted upon me appear permanent. It's not the only problem with the script. The whole thing feels so resoundingly lazy. The assumed identity villain role gives Jonathan Pryce far more to do than he had in the first, but it doesn't really add any sense of intrigue or unpredictability because you'll know where it's all headed and there's an expected, but still worrying, abundance of box-ticking going on.

The worst of it's problems though is simple. It very often seems as though the makers of this film had no idea what they were doing. One of the biggest action set-pieces involves some of the most inept ninjas you have ever seen. It's funny, but I'm not convinced they intended it to be so. It also marks the return of the first film's predilection for dodgy CGI. Elsewhere, proceedings are predictable in the extreme and, besides Stevenson's accent, there is nothing that you won't have seen before. In being better than The Rise Of Cobra, G.I. Joe: Retaliation shows just how bad that film really was.

ONE out of five