Rarely do I come away from a movie and have too much to say about it… most of the time, it’s like pulling pubes to come up with a new and exciting way to describe just how the latest summer blockbuster sucks. However, with G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, I’m finding that the opposite is true. There’s just so much to rip on that I have almost no clue where to start. Do I start with the acting? Do I start with the CGI tuna? Do I tell a story about my mom yelling at me for making gun noises too loudly when I used to play with the original G.I. Joe toys? Of course not… The Vocabulariast is cool. He didn’t sit around playing with dolls when he was young. He sat around watching Return of the Living Dead and “liking” Linnea Quigley… but he wasn’t old enough to do anything about it.

G.I. Joe is a movie that feels ripped from so many different sources that almost nothing original happens… and yet it’s hard to point out just how it’s ripping stuff off. The story isn’t worth giving a synopsis, because it’s about as stupid as the filmmakers who put together this catastrophe. From the very beginning, this project was cursed to suck… and when I heard The Dancing Dude (Channing Tatum) had been cast as the lead, I knew there was no chance in hell that I was going to see this movie. But… I review movies, even the ones with The Dancing Dude in them… and yes, he does dance.

The film borrows heavily from Star Wars and the Bond films… an odd combination, and one that will totally alienate anyone who was a fan of the cartoon series, which was goofily cheesy and dripping with loads of unintentional humor. Unfortunately, the G.I. Joe movie is a little more realistic, less cheesy, and dripping with loads of stuff that douche bags think is humorous… such as nonstop one-liners from Marlon Wayans… who was indeed better in the Dungeons and Dragons movie. Everything feels designed to make an epic movie, from the awesome Star Wars-esque submarine sequence, to the command center where everyone stands around a CGI model of the earth. Hell, there’s even a great Darth Vader-type reveal at the end of the movie and a Darth Vader/Obi Wan-type battle between Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes. Unfortunately, all these lifted scenes are ball-less and about as entertaining as creating petri dish samples from thirty different dudes foreskin smegma.

This film is most undone by its terrible CGI. Remember that ridiculous scene from the trailer of two G.I. Joes bouncing in the streets in their supersuits? Yes, it does look that bad in the theater. The whole film looks just as bad. Here’s just a small list of all the shitty looking CGI items in the film: CGI tuna, polar bear, submarines, airplanes, Eiffel Tower, motorcycles riders, trains, polar ice cap… but still… The Dancing Dude is the real thing.

I was almost prepared for the dread associated with The Dancing Dude, as he did feature prominently in the trailer, but then the rest of the cast presented itself. First off, you have the aforementioned Marlon Wayans, perhaps one of the most annoying people in the film industry today… because he’s always “the funny” black guy. It’s not his fault he has been typecast, but he doesn’t have to choose to do shitty movies… and then suck balls in them when he is cast. Then you’ve got Dennis Quaid, in full Ron Perlman mode. That’s the mode where a normally respectable actor shows up on a shit set, stands in a room with a bunch of talentless fucks and utters one-liners like an unfunny Henny Youngman. Yeah, that’s how bad he was; I had to go and reference a 1940’s stand-up comedian. A great one-liner from Henny Youngman: “My wife will buy anything marked down. Last year she bought an escalator.” The best one-liner from Dennis Quaid as General Hawk: “Knowing is half the battle.” It doesn’t quite compare does it. By the way, that Henny Youngman line is a thousand times more entertaining than the entirety of the G.I. Joe film.

Normally, I run through a whole paragraph about a cast in just one paragraph, but there’s just so much bad acting going on. Just when you think it can’t get any worse after watching The Dancing Dude spit out lines like they were glued to his tongue, the entire cast of the fucking Mummy shows up. Brendan Fraser pops up out of nowhere, so suddenly that I almost choked on my own tongue and went into a seizure. No one should just spring Brendan Fraser on an unsuspecting audience. Then, if that’s not bad enough, Arnold Vosloo shows up to suck even more life out of the audience as Zartan! Fucking Zartan! I can’t tell if it’s sad or ironic that a bald dude who can’t act plays a character that is one of the greatest actors in the world and who sported long-flowing locks in every previous incarnation there ever was of the character… but whatever. If Stephen Sommers wants to put all his butt buddies in a giant turd, record it, and call it a film, who am I to argue?

My only hope for this film was the presence of Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobra Commander. Even this was a monumental disappointment. The reality of Gordon-Levitt’s performance was tantamount to getting someone to agree to do the world’s nastiest sex act with you… and then finding out they thought you meant a handjob. For most of the movie, Joey G-L is some lame fucking doctor, and when he finally turns into Cobra Commander, they put the world’s dumbest looking mask on him. It basically looks like someone took a load of jiss and plopped it on Joey G-L’s face. But what do you expect when you’re best friends with The Dancing Dude… in real life. He’s Cobra Commander for five seconds, and then he’s put into a shitty jail cell… that looks remarkably similar to the end of the first X-Men movie.

It’s clear that director Stephen Sommers has no clue about the G.I. Joe universe or what fans of the toys actually liked about it. No one wanted a fucking origin tale about G.I. Joe and how it started, how Cobra started, or where Cobra Commander came from. What they wanted is people in masks shooting fields of lasers at each other, while Gung Ho tried to hide the fact that he was Village People-esque. Sommers is miserable as a director and the pacing, action, and characterizations in the film are mind-numbingly egregious acts of cinematic terrorism. All of the characters are bland, and Sommers sheds the individuality of the G.I. Joe universe for a world where everyone wears lame outfits and bounces around like a bunch of cracked out, breakdancing robots. In short, the motherfucker tried to make Transformers… which also sucked. But this sucks so much worse. If this movie was a whore and you stuck a dick in it’s mouth, the unlucky recipient would have their balls pulled through their shaft… that’s how much it sucks.

There isn’t one redeeming quality about this film. I can only hope that the depth and breadth of this review has gotten it through your thick skull that this movie is shittier than a KFC bathroom where the chicken isn’t quite done all the way. If you know what’s good for you, skip this shit.

Final Synopsis: This might be the worst movie of the year. While I was watching it, I went through three stages. Stage 1: This is bad. Stage 2: This is so bad it might be good. Stage 3: It’s back to being so bad that I want to rip my eyes out and replace them with Mr. Yuck stickers. That means, “Don’t watch.”

Points Lost: -1 for The Dancing Dude, -1 for Marlon Wayans sans elf ears, -1 for a shitty story, -1 for ripping off (or paying homage as Sommers might say) Star Wars, Bond films, X-Men, and Transformers, -1 for making everything CGI, -1 for lame characters, -1 for two/three shitty love stories… G.I. Joes don’t fuck, they kill… except for Gung Ho. Quick Kick is his bitch, -1 for being boring, -1 for missing out on what made G.I. Joes worth watching and playing with back in the day… not that I would know, because I was too cool for that. A nerd told me… yeah, that’s the ticket. Oh yeah… -1 for sneak attacking me with Brendan Fraser and Arnold Vosloo. Sommers, you bastard.

Lesson Learned: Toys make shitty movies.

Burning Question: Why didn’t they just make this rated-R? Everyone who played with those fucking toys and watched the show is old enough to have their own kids by now. Stupid Hollywood.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra aka G.I. Joe: The Rise of Bile in a Movie Reviewer’s Throat
0/10

Tags: 2009, action, adventure, arnold vosloo, bad CGI, byung-hun lee, channing tatum, christopher eccleston, dennis quaid, Jonathan Pryce, joseph gordon-levitt, karolina kurkova, kevin j. o'connor, latest movie reviews, marlon wayans, rachel nichols, ray park, recent3, said taghmaoui, sci-fi, shitty cgi, shitty movies, sienna miller, stephen sommers, terrorists, worst movie of 2009