G.I. Joe : Retaliation (Movie Review)

  

Summer movies rarely have world changing story lines. G. I. Joe: Retaliation is one of the many movies made up with blood pumping action scenes, a plot so silly and predictable you feel like such a movie expert pre-guessing how the movie would end. The action scenes are cliché but it doesn’t make it less appealing, 3D makes it entertaining, the score sounds a bit Transformer-ish – a dubstep influenced bass drop whenever there is some really smart kung fu move.

The movie starts out rather very normally, a night scene clearly depicting the many gimmick by Hollywood to sell movie tickets, if you have ever tried to stream a cinema captured print online, you’ll come to know that it’s impossible to see what goes on in a night scene. A black screen was also there for a handsome 2 minutes while the Joes were shouting military commands to each other’s, I’m guessing it’s another gimmick by the rich men AND women of Hollywood.

India is depicted as one of the nuclear armed countries for a press conference summoned by Zartan alias The President of USA, India is in reality too a nuclear state. The Indian representative got a lot of lines like, “Ban Kar”, “Are Bhakwan” during a scence when London was doomed with a specially formulated technology by Cobra Commander, Zeus; a satellite that fires missiles on earth. The weird thing about Zartan and his depiction of the President of USA is that he wants the world to be nuclear free so he called all the nuclear armed countries, Israel, France, North Korea and all that jazz and tricks them into dismantling their nuclear devices by firstly firing nuclear rockets at their countries forcing them to fire it back to the USA, then he selfdistruct the rockets forcing them to do the same. It’s surprising that Pakistan isn’t included as a nuclear country even though the situation of a Pakistani president being killed arises out at the beginning of the movie maybe it’s because our Muslim bros and sis aren’t as targeted commercially as compared to Hindustan where the movie shows in every cinema hall at least in 5 different time slots a day.

The plot seems to be kind of confusing at times; Snake Eyes is captured or framed, it seems like he would be neighbors with Cobra Commander in an underground detainment in Germany floating in a capsule where they would float with “their hearts and brains alive but not their muscles”, the guy who took him at the very underground prison compares it to hell saying, “Welcome to hell” when it turns out it was actually Storm Shadow who was coy to rescue cobra commander, another cliché, another action scene topped off by a very cliché scene; Storm Shadow frees Cobra Commander faced the guy who took him down initially and said, “Welcome to Hell”, I cringed a little. A lot of fights and a lot of emotion, the high point for emotion is when Channing Tatum dies from an air strike authorized by Zartan posing and looking as the president of the United States who Roadblock “voted for”, I can explain it, Zartan has this microchip technology that makes him look like the actual president who is held hostage. Channing’s dead brought tears to my eyes maybe because I still have the Magic Mike love for Channing, and it was funny because I knew he will be killed off. Either ways, most of the original casts in the first movie Rise Of The Cobra, do not return so Duke’s (Channing Tatum) death seems like a marketing thing rather than Zartan’s power. Women empowerment is a topic in this film too, and an underlying story of a girl trying to impress her dad is carried out by Lady Jayne, who Joe (Bruce Willis) likes to call “Brenda”. The thing is Lady Jayne happens to be a 3^rd generation military kid whose military dad denounce her because he “did not trust his life in the hands of a woman”, so she did what any woman would do, she tried to outrank him so that he would later salute her, but he died before he could, a sad realization that his dad would never feel the shame of being sexist.  But Joe, who happened to serve with Jayne’s dad, salutes her at the end saying, “Your father must be proud”.

There are lots of very cliché scenes and really dumb dialogues, when the 3 Joe survivors (Lady Jayne, Flin and Roadblock) set up a base after they return to the USA and try to find out if the president is someone else, Lady Jayne being the computer expert gives Roadblock and Flin her evidences. One, the president rests his thumb left on right unlike how he did from right on left. Two, he started using different phrases. It seems like this is the paramount for the silliness of the plot but it somehow makes sense again when Lady Jayne infiltrated a fund raiser night and stole the president’s hair thereby proving it with a DNA sampler pocket machine –one of the many technologically advance gizmo of the Joes- that it is indeed Zartan but rather than having a whimsical plot, it all blurred into mediocre territory until the movie is saved by yet another very thrilling an expensive-to-shoot action scene. The mountain scene at the Himalayas where Storm Shadow is treated for his wound is one of the most trilling scenes in the whole movie. It turns out it was never Storm Shadow who killed ‘the master’ but Zartan rather. Snake Eyes and Jynx with Blind master’s advice stole Storm Shadow from the Himalayas, it seems like just another Chinese meditation house on the top of a mountain but ninjas in red stormed to save Storm Shadows body from being stolen there by getting a lot of them killed, and I don’t even think I have to mention that Snake Eyes succeed.

Flin (D.J. Conor) never strikes a really huge lasting impression apart from the fact that he is really nice to look at, he’s handsome. Firefly (Joe Anderson) gives a lasting impression not because of his acting ability or his massive skill in kung fu but just the fact that he’s a hard core hunk, a handsome as fuck villain, can have that all day but like all other villains of movies made for teenage kids, I have to bid him farewell and watch him die or get killed by someone less handsome that him, Roadblock (Dwayne Johnson).  The movie ends with the President awarding the Joes, cliché after cliché and he also reassigns the protection to the Joe’s thereby reestablishing humanity’s fate so that we can live happily ever after.

P.s. I stayed late till the credits rolled hoping for an extra footage, which a lot of Hollywood movies do, but it just ended with the Hashbro logo, but it’s nostalgic, I was a child once too and my memories of trying to get Barbie and the G.I. Joe’s to have sex, more about that later.