Knowing G.I. Joe movie is for kids is half the battle

By Stacey Harrison

These old-school fans from Comic-Con might be disappointed with "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra"
These old-school fans from Comic-Con might be disappointed with "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra"

My inner 9-year-old should be ecstatic. Two of my childhood staples — Transformers and G.I. Joe — are ruling the box office, with Revenge of the Fallen already having morphed into one of the biggest movies in history, and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra opening this weekend (near my birthday, no less!). That favorite pastime of my friends and I of casting our very own live-action G.I. Joe movie the way some people fill out fantasy football rosters has finally been realized. I believe I had Harrison Ford as Duke squaring off against Christopher Walken as Cobra Commander. While G.I. Joe: TROC won’t be quite what I pictured it, it’s still a big-budget summer extravaganza with an endless potential for sequels.

So why am I a little bummed out? If you had told me in 1985 that Optimus Prime and Cobra Commander would still be relevant into my 30s, I’d have given you a “Yo Joe!” for the ages.

Yes, I’ve grown up, and that accounts for most of it. Taking down the Decepticons and fighting Cobra the Enemy doesn’t have quite the same lure it did when I would tune in to watch the cartoons every day after school. I’m certainly not rushing out to be the first one in line, and my kids are a bit too young to be into the endless number of tie-in toys. (Though I did buy the 5-year-old a sweet Snake Eyes figure.) But there should be part of me that’s gratified, right? The part that believed while the animation was cheap and the dialogue hokey, there was some merit to these franchises. That although both were conceived solely as commercials for the toys, there was a possibility to mine a decent story along with an eye-popping spectacle. Or at least something no dumber than the cartoons.

But that doesn’t appear to be the case with Transformers 2 or G.I. Joe: TROC. I’ve somehow managed to avoid being subjected to Revenge of the Fallen, but I’m satisfied with Roger Ebert’s assessment of it as a “horrible experience of unbearable length.” I’ll probably be compelled to see it at some point, if for no other reason than to see just how racist those mini-Decepticons (named Skids and Mudflap, tee hee) really are. As for G.I. Joe, my hopes were dashed the moment I heard who they named as director. None other than Stephen Sommers, who polished such cinematic turds as the first two Mummy movies, Van Helsing, Deep Rising and, way back in 1993, the most tone-deaf adaptation of Huck Finn known to man.

It didn’t help Sommers’ cause when Cartoon Network came out earlier this year with the decidedly not kid-friendly (and majorly kick-butt) G.I. Joe: Resolute, which unceremoniously killed off beloved characters and featured massive casualties and graphic violence. Seeing a toned-down PG-13 Hollywood version, which would be filled with ludicrous set pieces, non-stop corny one-liners and — eek! — Marlon Wayans never seemed less attractive.

You want good-old-fashioned G.I. Joe fun? Play with these.
You want good-old-fashioned G.I. Joe fun? Play with these.

But I’m not here to trot out the usual tired, overdramatic lines about Sommers and Paramount somehow raping my childhood. All they did was make a couple of big, dumb popcorn movies aimed at the 10-year-olds in the audience, only to piss off their 30-year-old dads. The same thing happened when George Lucas revisited Star Wars. While Episode I remains arguably the most-anticipated movie ever made (I remember standing in line to see the frickin’ trailer), it wasn’t long before it also became one of the most reviled. I won’t defend The Phantom Menace as a great movie, and Jar Jar Binks is justifiably loathed, but what the haters really pounced on wasn’t so much the quality of the movie as the fact that it failed to make them feel like they did when they were kids. But if you ask the kids in the audience, they were fine with it.

Which is what I expect the case will be with G.I. Joe. No movie could possibly recreate for me the pure, (key word here) unadulterated fun of playing with those action figures and watching those cartoons. Hell, I have some DVDs of the original shows and even those don’t do it. I find myself more interested in the bonus materials that showcase the people behind the scenes who actually wrote, voiced and produced the cartoons. As a kid, you just think these things pop out of the ether.

The good news is, there’s been some relatively positive buzz brewing about Sommers’ movie, though the skeptic inside me believes that’s due in large part to expectations that fell somewhere between “excrement” and “near excrement.” We’ve all spent so much time hating this movie that once we actually see it, we’re amazed that there is any level of competence to be found. It’s like they put all the worst parts in the trailer.

I will say that it is refreshing to see a big summer movie being a little mysterious in its marketing. It would have been easy to splash pictures of Destro in his silver mask, and an easily recognizable Cobra Commander all over the ads, but the studio has been very secretive. From what I can tell, Cobra Commander isn’t even billed as Cobra Commander. IMDb has him as The Doctor/Rex. Again, the skeptic could say that’s because the end result is so disappointing (we reportedly only see the bad guys in their full-on badassery in the last couple minutes). But even if that turns out to be true, it’s nice to think there will be something in the movie that hasn’t been spoiled by the trailers. How often can you say that anymore?

That said, it could very well suck. Hard. But instead of focusing on how much I’ll cringe whenever Marlon Wayans says, “Daaaaamn!’ or rolling my eyes every time Channing Tatum flexes for the camera, I’ll try to remember the feeling I had two years ago as I sat awaiting an opening-day showing of the first Transformers. There was a thirtysomething woman sitting a couple seats away from me who leaned over and said, “I’ve been waiting for this movie for 20 years!” She was bubbling over with glee. You know, like a kid.

1 Trackback / Pingback

  1. VOD Spotlight: Think you could sink this "Battleship"?

Comments are closed.