2013 - G.I. JOE RETALIATION, the follow up to G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Any movie based on a line of toys and a crappy limited animation cartoon series that ran in syndication is probably not going to be a very good one.  I believe this is the situation here. G. I Joe Retaliation is very stupid but is also very entertaining.  If it's a choice between Olivier's Hamlet or this, I believe I will come down on the side of the Joe's.

Picking up where the last film left off, the President of the United States has been replaced by an imposter from the evil organization COBRA.  COBRA plans to take over the world with a series of satellites that can shoot radiation beams or something at major countries around the world. This is essentially the same plot as in a couple of James Bond movies, Die Another Day and Goldeneye, so much for story originality.  The G.I. Joe team is betrayed and only three members survive, "Roadblock", played by Dwayne Johnson, "Lady Jaye" played by Adrianne Palicki and "Flint," played by some guy.  Meanwhile two Ninja guys battle it out in the Himalayas for some reason racing up and down mountain tops.  It's all clearly created with CGI but the scene is highly entertaining.

Well everyone shows up back in Washington D.C. where they team up with paycheck actor Bruce Willis phoning it in as usual.  There's lots of fights and goofy gadgets (more James Bond movie stuff ripoff).  The Joe's save the world with the exception of London and we are set up for yet another chapter in this series that apparently will never be made.

 

Okay what does this movie have going for it.  Well the action scenes for the most part are very entertaining.  Dwayne Johnson makes a good leader and the film does clip along at a decent pace.  The director Jon M.Chu is usually associated with musicals and there is kind of an approach to staging each shoot-em up like it was an old MGM musical number.  The film is a very entertaining time killer and there's nothing wrong with that.

 

Amusingly Channing Tatum was in the first G. I. Joe movie but wanted out probably after reading the screenplay so they killed him off towards the beginning of the film.  All the better, Dwayne Johnson is more than manly enough to take over his job.

The film was written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick who specialize in these kind of films, the running time is 110 minutes.