G.I. Joe

Well... what was I expecting? As if the corny subtitle wasn't a hint, this movie has about the intellectual depth of a flat surface (and yet it's sadly still better than Transformers 2). Based on the Hasbro toy-line, G.I. Joe is an international special peace-keeping task force led by General Hawk (Dennis Quaid). When a young U.S. soldier known as Duke (Channing Tatum) gets caught up in a scheme involving a weapons designer named Cullen (Christopher Eccleston) who plans to blow up the world using some missiles that can melt stuff, we get... a lot of special effects. The special effects aren't artful nor do they look particularly real and aren't even worth a 'wow, that's cool.' The acting is also surprisingly bad. I was at least hoping for their to be a redeeming quality in the ensemble cast (the talented names include Channing Tatum, Dennis Quaid, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Said Taghmaoui, Christopher Eccleston, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Sienna Miller, Arnold Vosloo, and Jonathan Pryce while the not so talented list of names includes... Marlon Wayans). Even some of the worst movies nowadays have at least one admirable performance but nothing can be found here. What else is wrong with the movie? It's too long for something so simple, the humor is corny, and it comes off like the producers had a military fetish but decided to look at war as escapist with no realm of seriousness to be found. Nothing is developed with the whole movie coming across as a bunch of sound. The characters are throwaways, I mean Cullen hates the world because his Scottish ancestors were embarrassed years ago and the President of the United States (Jonathan Pryce) sits around and waits to get briefed by the Joes... a sign that he "must" be doing his job correctly. At least the girls (Rachel Nichols as Scarlett and Sienna Miller as the Baroness) are sexy giving this film one more extra-set-of-on-screen-cleavage than Transformers 2.

Oh. There's also a ninja in the movie.