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G.I. Joe: Retaliation

(2013)

The best thing about the generally crappy G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra was the subplot involving the infiltration of the Whitehouse. It gave Jonathan Pryce, never one for underplaying, a chance to take centre stage. It was also one of the few parts of the movie that didn’t encourage Stephen Sommers to bounce off the walls like the ADD, taste-free scourge of cinema he is. So it’s welcome news that the sequel continues with that thread. And, with John M Chu at the helm, it’s certainly better assembled than the first movie. But it says something that, for all the action stars assembled here, the only character to have any real impact is played by Ray Park. And you can neither see his face nor hear him.

Until he is swallowed up during the third act, I was enjoying Park’s masked maestro Snake Eyes. Park has all the moves and then some, of course, but it was mainly the sheer bonkers bravura of the character that kept me interested. I found myself questioning how the Hollywood machine didn’t spit out a revised Snake Eyes, completely altered from his toy persona. If Judge Dredd takes his head gear off, surely Snake Eyes will doff his helmet and engage in a sparkling dialogue with some lovely lady. Instead, he’s this ever-imposing, black-clad silent knight. Presumably he always wears this gear when he goes on a mission and never says a word. I’m astounded that he ever gets results; he’ll stick out like a sore thumb if he goes out in daylight or anywhere remotely populated. And, if he needs to interrogate someone, that speech impediment’s really going to put a cramp in his style. He’s conceptually unfeasible, basically, and the film’s all the better for his presence. It could have done with embracing a bit more of that silliness rather than ending up as just another action movie.

During the opening scenes, Channing Tatum’s Duke strikes up a good rapport with Dwayne Johnson’s Roadblock, but once Johnson’s left playing against bland D. J. Cotrona the chemistry fizzles. There’s only so much renta-Johnson franchises can take to spice them up, and his charisma isn’t best served here. Back when the first film came out I barely registered the lovechild of Stockard Channing and Tatum O’Neal; four years later when he absents the screen he creates a void.

So who better to fill it than Bruce Willis, wisecracking his way through every scene like he did in his heyday? You remember the first Die Hard and Last Boy Scout. Unfortunately it’s not that Bruce Willis. This is the same Willis who’s more intent on drifting stony faced through cameos (see also The Expendables), unwilling to goof off in David Addison mode. Apparently Bruce is responsible for the friendly sparring between his’ “original Joe” and Adrianne Palicki’s Jaye. You just wish much more could have been made of it. Willis does deliver the odd funny line (although you’ve heard the best if you’ve watched the trailer), but this is further evidence that he’s spent the last decade pissing his career away (Wes Anderson aside).

Then there are the villains. Byung-hun Lee is saddled with the most ridiculous character development as Storm Shadow; it’s very much on the “Doh!” spectrum. Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s non-return sees Cobra Commander voiced and performed by two different people and Chris Eccleston was never coming back even if the first movie had received Best Picture Oscar. Arnold Vosloo returns, eager for work, but it’s little more than a cameo. So that leaves Ray Stevenson, whose Firefly has the bulk to take on Roadblock but little else. Stevenson seems preoccupied with his lousy Southern accent and fails to inject any fun into the proceedings; it’s left to Pryce to make the villains sell the menace of Cobra (he gets to “hang out with Bono” and even makes a line like “You know, they call it a waterboard, but I never got bored” kind of work).

Chu’s direction isn’t bad; certainly good enough to wrench himself from the doldrums of directing Step Up movies and Justin Bieber documentaries, but he never manages to give the film as a whole much momentum. Individual sequences work fine, but that’s all they are. You’re not invested in getting anywhere with the plot so before long listlessness sets in. Even the fight on the cliff face, which looked like the highlight from the trailers, doesn’t quite have the thrill it ought.

There are a few daffy elements to note; more emphasis on that tone might have made for more memorable results. Storm Shadow undergoes a healing process that involves a curious mixture of Eastern magic/medicine and science. There’s an early training session between Jinx (Elodie Yung) and Snake Eyes that’s also big on the Eastern wisdom, with RZA presiding as a blind master. It verges on Austin Powers self-parody but, alas, it’s played deadly straight.

A movie this mindless obviously has no worthwhile pretentions of making statements about the state of the planet. Cobra’s world domination gambit is particularly ridiculous. But I did wonder if there was some modest propaganda in there. The whole premise is a celebration of the US armed forces after all, even if in a somewhat adulterated way. So North Korea is established as an out and out enemy in the first scene, while Pakistan is identified as incredibly weak (you can steal their nukes and kill their president in the blink of an eye). I’m not sure what the mass destruction of London is about, but Roland Emmerich would be proud. Then there are the shout-outs to the greatness of Patton; the whole movie desperately needed to have its tongue firmly in its cheek, but there’s only the odd wink.

A third instalment is inevitable, as the Hasbro brand has managed to expand its appeal overseas (to the tune of $100m on top of Rise of the Cobra’s gross). It seems that Chu is attached, and he’ll no doubt refine his skills. But the series really needs a shot in the arm in the script department, and to embrace its essential absurdity.

**1/2

Doctors make the worst patients.

Coma (1978) (SPOILERS) Michael Crichton’s sophomore big-screen feature, and by some distance his best. Perhaps it’s simply that this a milieu known to him, or perhaps it’s that it’s very much aligned to the there-and-now and present, but Coma , despite the occasional lapse in this adaptation of colleague Robin Cook’s novel, is an effective, creepy, resonant thriller and then some. Crichton knows his subject, and it shows – the picture is confident and verisimilitudinous in a way none of his other directorial efforts are – and his low-key – some might say clinical – approach pays dividends. You might also call it prescient, but that would be to suggest its subject matter wasn’t immediately relevant then too.

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.

I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.

The Apartment (1960) (SPOILERS) Billy Wilder’s romcom delivered the genre that rare Best Picture Oscar winner. Albeit, The Apartment amounts to a rather grim (now) PG-rated scenario, one rife with adultery, attempted suicide, prostitution of the soul and subjective thereof of the body. And yet, it’s also, finally, rather sweet, so salving the darker passages and evidencing the director’s expertly judged balancing act. Time Out ’s Tom Milne suggested the ending was a cop out (“ boy forgives girl and all’s well ”). But really, what other ending did the audience or central characters deserve?

The Bible never said anything about amphetamines.

The Color of Money (1986) (SPOILERS) I tend to think it’s evident when Scorsese isn’t truly exercised by material. He can still invest every ounce of the technical acumen at his fingertips, and the results can dazzle on that level, but you don’t really feel the filmmaker in the film. Which, for one of his pictures to truly carry a wallop, you need to do. We’ve seen quite a few in such deficit in recent years, most often teaming with Leo. The Color of Money , however, is the first where it was out-and-out evident the subject matter wasn’t Marty’s bag. He needed it, desperately, to come off, but in the manner a tradesman who wants to keep getting jobs. This sequel to The Hustler doesn’t linger in the mind, however good it may be, moment by moment.

Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.

You just threw a donut in the hot zone!

Den of Thieves (2018) (SPOILERS) I'd heard this was a shameless Heat rip-off, and the presence of Gerard Butler seemed to confirm it would be passable-at-best B-heist hokum, so maybe it was just middling expectations, even having heard how enthused certain pockets of the Internet were, but Den of Thieves is a surprisingly very satisfying entry in the genre. I can't even fault it for attempting to Keyser Soze the whole shebang at the last moment – add a head in a box and you have three 1995 classics in one movie – even if that particular conceit doesn’t quite come together.

This guy’s armed with a hairdryer.

An Innocent Man (1989) (SPOILERS) Was it a chicken-and-egg thing with Tom Selleck and movies? Did he consistently end up in ropey pictures because other, bigger big-screen stars had first dibs on the good stuff? Or was it because he was a resolutely small-screen guy with limited range and zero good taste? Selleck had about half-a-dozen cinema outings during the 1980s, one of which, the very TV, very Touchstone Three Men and a Baby was a hit, but couldn’t be put wholly down to him. The final one was An Innocent Man , where he attempted to show some grit and mettle, as nice-guy Tom is framed and has to get tough to survive. Unfortunately, it’s another big-screen TV movie.

Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists!

Don’t Look Up (2021) (SPOILERS) It’s testament to Don’t Look Up ’s “quality” that critics who would normally lap up this kind of liberal-causes messaging couldn’t find it within themselves to grant it a free pass. Adam McKay has attempted to refashion himself as a satirist since jettisoning former collaborator Will Ferrell, but as a Hollywood player and an inevitably socio-politically partisan one, he simply falls in line with the most obvious, fatuous propagandising.

Captain, he who walks in fire will burn his feet.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) (SPOILERS) Ray Harryhausen returns to the kind of unadulterated fantasy material that made Jason and the Argonauts such a success – swords & stop motion, if you like. In between, there were a couple of less successful efforts, HG Wells adaptation First Men in the Moon and The Valley of the Gwangi (which I considered the best thing ever as a kid: dinosaur walks into a cowboy movie). Harryhausen’s special-effects supremacy – in a for-hire capacity – had also been consummately eclipsed by Raquel Welch’s fur bikini in One Million Years B.C . The Golden Voyage of Sinbad follows the expected Dynamation template – blank-slate hero, memorable creatures, McGuffin quest – but in its considerable favour, it also boasts a villainous performance by nobody-at-the-time, on-the-cusp-of-greatness Tom Baker.

Archimedes would split himself with envy.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) (SPOILERS) Generally, this seems to be the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad outing that gets the short straw in the appreciation stakes. Which is rather unfair. True, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger lacks Tom Baker and his rich brown voice personifying evil incarnate – although Margaret Whiting more than holds her own in the wickedness stakes – and the structure follows the Harryhausen template perhaps over scrupulously (Beverly Cross previously collaborated with the stop-motion auteur on Jason and the Argonauts , and would again subsequently with Clash of the Titans ). But the storytelling is swift and sprightly, and the animation itself scores, achieving a degree of interaction frequently more proficient than its more lavishly praised peer group.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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