Film Review: G.I.Joe: Retaliation

About the film

G.I.Joe: Retaliation is an action/ adventure/ sci-fi film that is the second in the G.I. Joe series. The film was released at the cinema on 27^th March  with a run time of 110 minutes and a rating of 12A.

Plot

After being framed for crimes against America, the G.I.Joe team are terminated after a command from the President. However, the President is actually an imposter. The man standing in his place, Zartan, has the ability to take on the looks and voice of someone else and plans to take over the world. Zartan knows that the Joes are the only people able to stop him so attempts to get rid of them altogether. A few survive though and are hell bent on putting things right and stopping Zartan before he goes too far.

What I thought

My main reason for going to see this film was because of Channing Tatum. I’m easy persuaded to see a film if there is a hot guy in it, even if I have no interest in the film itself. I also remember seeing the first G.I. Joe film and thinking it wasn’t too bad so didn’t mind going to see this one at all.

With a pretty strong cast, you would think that would make up for the terrible plot of this film. It doesn’t though. Channing Tatum doesn’t stick around for very long, Elodie Yung gives a terribly stiff performance as Jinx and Dwayne Johnson is good but he has been better in many other films. None of the cast members are given characters with much depth either, which doesn’t help things at all. Although Johnson’s character, Roadblock, is given a family and small children, I still didn’t overly care about what happened to him.

Bruce Willis also makes an appearance but his role screens desperation. His character, the original Joe, General Joseph Colton is used to help out the surviving Joes. His character does very little for the plot apart from give Willis the chance to blow up some more stuff. The character is also very stereotypical for Willis and doesn’t show anything new from the actor. Although I do really like Willis, I didn’t see the need for his involvement in this film whatsoever.

G.I.Joe: Retaliation has a plot worth laughing at. The bad guy is someone impersonating the President, even though he acts nothing like the real guy, and makes decisions he never would. Pretty much, Zartan is planning to either take over the world or bomb it with nuclear bombs, and doesn’t care too much about the consequences. There were some really bad moments regarding Zartan’s plans and the other world leaders, which could be seen as extremely offensive or funny, depending on where you stand on particular topics. While other bad guys are also brought in, they never seemed very evil or original. The film does try to be interesting though but it fails miserably. One character, Storm Shadow is given quite a large background story but it is skimmed over quite quickly and not used as well as it could have been.

As an action film, you can expect plenty of fight scenes and explosions. However, these were also not all that impressive. Instead of having some really great gadgets like in the first film, this one is more military based so it relies on big tanks and big guns and this was not nearly exciting enough for me. Also, I have to say that I didn’t watch this in 3D or IMAX and I am bloody glad I didn’t. What a waste of money that would have been. There is one really nice fight scene though, which takes place on the side of a mountain. This was really well choreographed and looked great on the big screen but a large part of that was due to the location of the shoot.

With weak characters, a weak plot and weak action scenes, I could not recommend this film at all. I was highly disappointed with it and wish I hadn’t bothered going to see it.