Like a kid banging his toys together and blowing them up with firecrackers, Sommers has made a movie that’s a series of action set pieces strung together with a minimal amount of exposition, stopping only to catch his breath and to move the story along far enough to get to the next action set piece. And I’m embarrassed to say that it works. Sommers sets the tone perfectly. The silliness inherent in the concept is embraced – GI Joe is a multi-national team with a miles-deep secret base in the desert, a resident ninja, a fleet of subs and planes and helicopters and suits of power armour (that they only bother to use once).
Thankfully Sommers resists the urge to grit the film up because there is no way you can add realism to a premise like this. He also resists, in the main, the urge to wink too broadly at the audience – more than once GI Joe plays like a parody of itself, but mostly the film understands we’re all in on it and proceeds from there.
Perhaps his smartest move was hiring fairly good actors for roles that don’t really require too much acting. Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Christopher Eccleston, Jonathan Pryce, Dennis Quaid and Sienna Miller bring a certain amount of class and reality even to characters based on a toy line. While none of them are in danger of being accused of serious acting in this film, they all have fun while keeping the film grounded in enjoyable characters.
Sommers next best move was knowing how to shoot action scenes. Unlike Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, GI Joe clues the viewer in on the geography of action scenes.
The plot resembles that of the original cartoon. Motivations seem to boil down to being good or being bad, and I don’t fully get the roundabout aspects of what arms dealing, super weapon creating baddie Destro is trying to accomplish. Then again, he’s essentially a Bond villain on steroids.
