Facts & Figures

* Title: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
* IMDB rating at time of writing: 5.8
* Year: 2009
* Length: 113 minutes
* Country: United States
* Director: Stephen Sommers
* Producers: Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Bob Ducsay & Brian Goldner
* Writers: Stuart Beattie, David Elliot, Paul Lovett, Michael B. Gordon, Stephen Sommers & Larry Hama
* Cinematography: Mitchell Amundsen
* Music: Alan Silvestri
* Cast: Channing Tatum, Dennis Quaid, Marlon Wayans, Rachel Nichols, Arnold Vosloo, Christopher Eccleston, Ray Park, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Saïd Taghmaoui, Joseph-Gorden Levitt, Sienna Miller, Jonathan Pryce & Byung-Hun Lee

Plot summary (Spoiler alert!)

The movie starts somewhere in the middle ages, where James McCullen is punished for selling weapons to rebels. He is given a metal mask, which is burnt to his face.
In the near future, a descendant of James McCullen (Christopher Eccleston) is also in the weapons trade, and has developed a weapon based on nanomites. These microscopic robots eat through metals at a phenomenal rate, and one warhead loaded with nanomites is capable of destroying an entire city. NATO buys four of the nanomite-loaded warheads and a team, led by Duke (played by Channing Tatum) and his friend Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) are sent to escort the weapons from the MARS-facility to the closest NATO base. Their convoy is, naturally, ambushed by a group of highly-trained and well-armed men, led by The Baroness, whom Duke recognises as his former fiancee Ana (Sienna Miller). At the last moment the warheads, Duke and Ripcord are saved by members of GI Joe: The beautiful Scarlett (Rachel Nichols), the silent yet deadly ninja Snake Eyes (Ray Park), the communications expert Breaker (Saïd Taghmaoui) and the explosives expert Heavy Duty (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). The weapons, Duke and Ripcord are taken by the GI Joe team to their command center in Egypt, called "The Pit", where GI Joe commander General Hawk (Dennis Quaid) takes over the weapons and gets convinced to train the duo for GI Joe.

It is revealed that McCullen, helped by the mysterious masked man known only as "The Doctor", uses nanomites to change soldiers to unstoppable killing machines, who have no fear and who are harder to kill than any other, due to the nanomites repairing any damage to the body. He plans to steal back the warheads, having acquired the location of the Pit by using a tracker that was hidden in the case, and use them to spread panic and take control of the world (Of Course!). He sends the Baroness, the ninja Storm Shadow (Byung-Hun Lee) and the mysterious Zartan (Arnold Vosloo) to attack the Pit and take back the weapons. At first the attack goes well, with gen. Hawk disabled, but soon the G.I. Joe teams start fighting back, forcing Storm Shadow and the Baroness to escape with a jet pack, and Zartan to quietly withdraw, disguised as a camel herder.

The Cobra-team smuggles the warheads to Paris, where they want to use a particle accelerator (in a lab owned by the Baroness' husband), to weaponize the nanomites. The Joe's try to stop them with a high-speed pursued through Paris, but are unable to stop one of the warheads being fired at the Eiffel tower. The Tower is destroyed, but Duke manages to hit the kill-switch of the weapon, which allows him to be captured and to be taken to McCullen's base in the Arctic.

Throughout this, there are occasional flashbacks to the youth of Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes, who grew up together and were trained in martial arts from early on in their lives. Their master always favored Snake Eyes, which caused Storm Shadow to be jealous and kill their master. Upon discovering this, Snake Eyes took a vow of silence until he could get revenge by killing Storm Shadow.

The Joe's manage to locate the secret Cobra-base and fly there against orders, where they find out that McCullen has loaded three ballistic missiles with nanomite warheads, which he plans to use against Bejing, Moscow and Washington DC. Snake Eyes manages to take the Bejing one out, but Moscow and Washington fly off at high speed. Ripcord quickly flies off in a stolen prototype jet, while Scarlett, Breaker and Snake Eyes infiltrate the base. Snake Eyes encounters Storm Shadow and manages to kill him after a fight. Guided by Scarlett, Ripcord destroys the missile headed to Moscow and pursuits the Washington one. He misses it, but decides to use his plane as a net to catch all nanomites and take them up into the upper atmosphere, where the thin air will deactive them. Inside the base, Duke learns that the Doctor is actually Rex Lewis, the brother of Ana/The Baroness, who was a member of Duke's squad and believed killed in an airstrike. The explosion merely disfigured him, and he was saved by Dr. Mindbender and taught everything about nanomites. In the end, his madness about being left behind made him implant his own sister with nanomites, to put her under his control, which created The Baroness out of Ana Lewis. The Baroness manages to break through the mind control to save Duke, by which McCullen gets burned by his own flamethrower when trying to kill Duke, causing him and The Doctor to flee in an escape submarine. The Doctor triggers a self-destruct sequence, by which tons of polar ice fall on the base, destroying it. Duke and Ana, back to herself, follow them in a stolen submarine.

Inside the submarine, The Doctor takes on the title of Cobra Commander and uses nanomites to heal McCullen's face, this also causes him to fall under the Doctor's control and gets him the new name of Destro. They are quickly captured by GI Joe after this, and are detained in a high security prison. The Baroness is placed in protective custody until all the nanomites can be removed.

In an epilogue, the American President (Jonathan Pryce), gets ambushed by Cobra agent and his identity is assumed by Zartan, having his appearance changed by nanomites, but not his identity taken over.

Review

G.I. Joe will be a name well known to many of a certain age, as it was a huge franchise of action figures made by Hasbro, which started back in the '60's. This was all, however, before I came around, so I won't ramble about this. I will ramble about the movie: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. This action movie was written out of storylines that were part of the action figures, and features an ensemble cast with, among others, Channing Tatum, Dennis Quaid, Sienna Miller and Christopher Eccleston.

This is a typical action movie, intended to be watched by groups of friends with a beer and a bucket of popcorn. The storylines are easy and short and the lots of action scenes are expensive with lots of effects. Therein also lies the major problem with this movie: it is pure action-intended. Nobody cares about who is related to who, so don't put it in the movie! Either you make a straight action movie with lots of effects and a thin storyline, and you write it as one, OR you make a movie about friendship, teamwork and anger, and put some action moments in it. This movie tried to be both, but failed at both. For a straight action movie the storylines and plot-twists (which are more like plot-roundabouts) are too complicated and confusing, they are added at random moments in the movie and have no point. Especially the whole Snake Eyes/Storm Shadow relationship in flashbacks is pointless and confusing. For a team/buddy-movie, the storylines are too confusing and too random. It is like this movie was written, but somebody came by for a cup of coffee, saw that it was about various people with no relationship to each other and decided to rewrite a few scenes, without having seen the full script.

The effects and action sequences of this movie are quite good, but can be a bit too fast and blurry, which makes it looks as if the budget for effects was gone so they just sped it up and hoped nobody noticed. It is also a pity that a lot of potential great action scenes are not written: one of the characters is an explosive expert, but spends his life in subs, driving vans and looking mean as some sort of a Mr. T fanboy.

The movie does try, but it needs more. More budget, more action and mostly more experience in direction. editing and writing. The actors all do their thing: Marlon Wayans is an unfunny funny guy with an accent who is after the ladies, Dennis Quaid is a stern general with a soft heart, Ray Park waves with various swords, Christopher Eccleston talks with a big accent, Arnold Vosloo is untrustworthy and Michael Pryce plays a civilised gentleman in a suit. The performance that I liked best, however, was Sienna Miller. She manages to avoid being typecasted and is clearly having fun playing the bad girl in an action movie. I wouldn't mind seeing more of her in parts like this.

Conclusions

A decent popcorn movie, but I wouldn't watch it more than one or two times. The effects are nice, but the story is just weak and over the top, the plot twists are predictable and boring and the action moments are too long and not convincing. For an action popcorn-movie it's 2½ out of 5 stars for me, because it DOES try to be entertaining and somewhat refreshing to the action genre. It is, however, still way more entertaining than Transformers II, which came out round the same time and was meant for the same audiences. I fear for the sequel.