Film review: GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Published on Friday 7 August 2009 14:57

GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra (12A) ***

Based on the popular, military-themed action figures, GI Joe: The Rise Of Cobra is an action adventure by numbers from the director of The Mummy and Van Helsing.

Aimed squarely at teenage boys with limited attention spans, Stephen Sommers' muscular, all-guns-blazing romp has big weapons, bigger explosions and visual effects-heavy sequences in abun-dance.

One protracted set-piece in the French capital leaves countless flaming vehicles littering the usually tranquil boulevards before the coup de grace: the toppling of the Eiffel Tower into the Seine. Safe to say, GI Joe won't be healing any rifts in Franco-American relations, especially when the team is far more successful protecting targets on US soil.

There are plentiful flashbacks, accounting for the near two-hour running time, and rapid-fire editing that marches in double time with Alan Silvestri's booming score.

A prologue set in mid-17th century France establishes the unfortunate history of the clan fronted by arms dealer James McCullen (Christopher Eccleston), whose company has invented a nanobyte missile capable of razing an entire city in minutes.

Best friends Duke (Channing Tatum) and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) are part of the security detail, hired by McCullen to protect his state-of-the-art warheads.

Alas, The Baroness (Sienna Miller) and her minions attempt to steal the payload, only to be thwarted by an elite team of soldiers called GI Joe, who use the latest in next-generation spy and military equipment.

General Hawk (Dennis Quaid) leads this merry band of men and women, whose ranks include Shana 'Scarlett' O'Hara (Rachel Nichols), Breaker (Said Taghmaoui), Heavy Duty (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and mute swordsman Snake Eyes (Ray Park).

Duke and Ripcord quickly enrol, and they work hard in the gym and the training simulators to build physical strength and shooting accuracy.

Meanwhile, The Baroness and her cohorts in terror - Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee) and master of disguise Zartan (Arnold Vosloo) - prepare to take the fight to the Egyptian desert and deep below the polar ice-caps under the aegis of their commander, the mysterious Destro.

GI Joe careens through its set-pieces at a brisk pace, quickly establishing the romantic past of Duke and The Baroness in flashback, though not in enough detail to gross out the target teenage audience.

Tatum and Wayans blast and sprint into the melee with the occasional one-liner, but like the rest of the cast they continually take a back seat to the effects, some of which are extremely amateurish and clumsy.

Brendan Fraser, who played the lead in The Mummy for director Sommers, enjoys a brief, uncredited cameo as Duke's superior.

The downbeat final scene clearly tees up a sequel, but it's hard to imagine this opening instalment making enough money at the box office to warrant successive tours of duty.