When you’re about to watch a movie, it’s best to push all of your preconceived notions about it out of your head and view it open-mindedly as a singular viewing experience. Don’t judge it based on expectations that its source material or earlier films that it might be a sequel to have put in your head. Instead approach it on its own terms and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses in a vacuum. Or, at least, that’s the theory. But when you’re watching a movie like GI Joe: Retaliation, which is a sequel to a much-reviled adaptation of a beloved action figure/video game/cartoon property from the 80s, following those rules starts to seem a little silly. Making a live action GI Joe movie is kind of a crazy idea in the first place, but we all loved the Joe stuff from when we were kids enough that we were willing to turn our brains off in order to have fun with one for nostalgia’s sake anyway—so it was very off-putting that 2009’s GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra went and got everything wrong to the point where we couldn’t even enjoy it on a base level. Because of this, the most important thing to know about Retaliation is that it makes an effort to fix all of the mistakes of the first film.
Every GI Joe story is exactly the same—Cobra tries to take over the world and the Joes stop them—so we don’t really need to do any plot synopsis here. Instead, let’s focus our energies on what all it was that director Stephen Sommers’ The Rise of Cobra got wrong, and how Jon M. Chu’s new film fixes most of the issues. You might not think that bringing in the director of the Step Up sequels and Justin Bieber: Never Say Never would be the logical way to fix an action movie franchise, but damned if the strategy didn’t work out pretty well here anyway. There are a lot of criticisms that can and will be hailed at Chu’s GI Joe: Retaliation, but everyone should at least be willing to agree that he approached the material as a fan, or at least as a professional willing to do some research and honor what came before him.
Chu’s fandom/professionalism is so readily apparent because his film’s visuals jump out at you right away as being in line with all of that old GI Joe stuff from the property’s heyday. The logos, the designs... all of the classic iconography is here. Rise of Cobra featured a Cobra Commander who didn’t look like Cobra Commander, a Cobra organization that had yet to develop all of their snazzy uniforms and logos, and a team of Joes who looked more like futuristic mech pilots than badass military men. That was a terrible direction to go in, all around. Retaliation, visually, looks less like its own thing and more like an old GI Joe cartoon come to life, which you would imagine would be the point of making a GI Joe movie rather than an action movie called something else in the first place—to tap into the nostalgia for the property. Perhaps most importantly though, Retaliation gives Snake Eyes a mask that doesn’t include pursed, rubber lips. Thank God. That looked really dumb.
All of the high tech military gadgets are handled much better in this film as well. Rise of Cobra went so over the top with the advanced science gear that the film didn’t feel grounded in our reality at all. Instead of looking like a movie about a cutting edge military outfit, it looked like one of the Star Wars prequels. Retaliation has a few gadgets that are senseless and impractical, but it generally strikes a much better balance by focusing mostly on guns and missiles and souped-up vehicles, which is how it should be. Not only does making the gear look more like stuff that really exists help to ground the action and make it feel more tactile and dangerous, but it also puts less of a strain on the visual effects people to come up with CG things happening against CG environments, which not only looks better and better engages the audience, but also costs less than everything they tried to pull off in the first film. And that’s just smart.
The visuals aren’t the only place where the film makes improvements either. The characters introduced in this one are more interesting and are brought to life with better acting too. The main relationship in Rise of Cobra was the straight man/comic relief dynamic going on between Channing Tatum’s Duke and Marlon Wayans’ Ripcord, and it was generally just awful. Dwayne Johnson takes Wayans’ place in this film as the burly Roadblock, and the improvement is profound. Johnson and Tatum have an easy chemistry, so in their scenes together you’re quickly made to care about Duke far more than any of the ridiculous melodramatics regarding his complicated past made us care about him in Rise of Cobra. Tatum is at his best when he’s playing light and fun, and at his worst when he’s playing dangerous and dramatic, so the way his character is portrayed in this film as the playful bro rather than as the troubled warrior plays to his strengths instead of shining a spotlight on his weaknesses. Plus, the scenes of them palling around in Roadblock’s living room shows the Joes as being relatable and human, which is something the more broadly fantastic first film neglected to do.
Johnson is just fun to watch, and really he has chemistry with everybody he works with. If there was any big shot in the arm this film provided that now makes G.I. Joe a franchise worth salvaging, it’s his involvement. The villains of the piece do their part to help out too though, as they’re a huge improvement here. Not only is Cobra Commander the mysterious, blank-faced, embodiment of pure evil that fans remember him as, but Ray Stevenson makes an impression as Firefly as well. You can always rely on him to play a smarmy heavy, and this movie is no exception. Best of all though is Jonathan Pryce as the President. If you remember the cliffhanger ending of the first film, the President had been replaced by Cobra’s resident master of disguise, Zartan (Arnold Vosloo, when he’s not in disguise), which gives Pryce a lot of room to really ham things up as the evil guy pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes—and he’s great fun to watch when he’s being bad. This guy should do nothing but slasher movies where he gleefully chops up coeds from here on out.
It should be noted that there are a few actors who show up in small roles and do their best to drag the film down with them though. RZA’s embarrassing cameo as Snake Eyes’ new ninja boss, the Blind Master, is just too cheesy and awful to abide. He already proved that he doesn’t have the gravity to deliver super-dramatic kung-fu movie dialogue in The Man With the Iron Fists, but here he really hammers the point home. Fast-forwarding through any scenes set in his ninja penthouse would do yourself and this film some favors. Bringing Bruce Willis in as the General who the Joes got their name from doesn’t really work out either. Using Willis was nothing more than a stunt casting that resulted in him sleep-walking through yet another role he was clearly not all that enthused to be taking. His character is non-essential to the story, and he doesn’t add anything to the film other than his famous face. Hindsight being 20/20, excising his character completely and giving more screen time to Tatum would have probably been a smart move.
This being primarily an action movie, we should definitely address the action they give us, which is serviceable. Okay, so the ninja battle that occurs on the side of a steep mountain is more than serviceable, it’s the standout sequence of the film that elevates it from being a slight improvement over the wretched Rise of Cobra into being a kind of fun action flick that’s worth a watch. All of the mid-air rope ballet and sword slashing is dizzying, thrilling, and, best of all, doesn’t look completely fake. The rest of the action sequences are just serviceable though. They’re not all that memorable or thrilling, nor is the way they’re shot and edited all that artful or impressive, but they’re at least grounded and small-scale enough that they don’t feel like cartoon nonsense where none of the characters are actually in danger, and they’re at least presented competently enough to where you can always keep track of what’s supposed to be happening. For today’s action movie climate, that’s probably accomplishment enough.
Hopefully all of this praise doesn’t go to Chu’s head, because despite the fact that Retaliation is an improvement over its predecessor in basically every way, it’s still just a loud, dumb action movie. The plot is ridiculous, the characters do strange things that leave you scratching your head, the death toll in the third act goes way over the top without appropriately acknowledging how over the top it is, and it still has Snake Eyes walking around amongst the other characters covered head to toe in ninja gear and not talking, as if that’s reasonable. The visual of his character existing is something that doesn’t really translate well from comic book to live action, whether he’s got ridiculous rubber lips on his mask or not. So, while Retaliation isn’t quite the soulless atrocity meant to cash in on the inexplicable success of 2007’s chaotic mess, Transformers, like Rise of Cobra was, it isn’t anything legitimately good either. But it’s a rock simple GI Joe movie that focuses solely on the good guys and the bad guys having fun fighting each other, which is a pretty close approximation to what it was like playing with GI Joe toys back in the day, so that has to count for something.
