Review of G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013) by Alexproductions — 06 Sep 2013

G.I. Joe Retaliation featuring Dwayne Johnson, Channing Tatum, and Bruce Willis, is the third movie of the series, and the most hyped about. After seeing the trailer a year before it came out, I thought that they did this because the film was not as good as the crew thought, and Paramount still wanted to make their money. Turns out, Paramount just wanted their money. Director, Jon M. Chu really made some big mistakes. Read the full review to learn why. Retaliation begins with the infiltration of a North Korean base. I wasn't really sure what the outcome was because out of nowhere the G.I. Joe movie intro begins.

It seemed to me that they spent more time on the intro then the actual movie. Roadblock (Dwayne Johnson) and Duke (Channing Tatum) are great friends in the film as shown by their friendly bets on their shooting accuracy, and Call of Duty matches. Within the first ten minutes of the film, Duke is killed by an enemy chopper that just completely wipes out their base while Roadblock, Jaye, (Adrianne Palicki) and Flint, (D.J. Cotrona) are underwater in a small tunnel. They escape and try to figure out what is going on, when we learn that Zartan (Arnold Vosloo) is in the presidents disguise while the real president (Jonathan Pryce) is captured, and Snake Eyes (Ray Park) has been captured and imprisoned by Warden James. (Walton Goggins).

What I noticed about Retaliation is that about half of the movie is just fight scenes which though it is entertaining, it is just filler. The three Joes meet with General Joe Colton (Bruce Willis) at his house, whose entire first floor has trapdoors to weapons. It started to get excessive after the fifth drawer was opened containing more grenades. Again, their goes two more minutes of the film. My favorite part of the movie is when Zartan, (still disguised as the president) is meeting with all the world’s leaders telling them to give up their nuclear weapons. As they continue to call him crazy, he releases America’s nukes at all of the countries in the room. As the leaders fight back, they all have given up their weapons and are now in a nuclear free world like Zartan wished. Then he released one missile from his master weapon called Zeus, and wipes out most of London. As there is a short time before the rest of the weapon is deployed, Roadblock is the only one that can stop it.

I will not reveal the ending but the movie was so predictable, a nine year old could have figured it out. While watching the movie, I wrote down a few of the things that really bugged me. The gunshots to start off. They looked like a crappy low budget film effect, and I can say that a $130 million dollar budget is not even close to low. I even recognized that in one of the fight scenes, the there was no sound effect when a kick to the face was thrown. One of our main characters Duke was killed within the first ten minutes which I mentioned earlier. I thought this was a big mistake because if the crew knew he was going to die this early in the film, they shouldn't have taken the precious movie length and added the pointless times in which they were together playing Call of Duty and having bets on babysitting each others kids. When I say precious run time, I am talking about the film being exactly 90 minutes. To compare, in this franchise, Rise of the Cobra was 118 min and directed by Stephen Sommers.

I'm not sure if director Chu went into the film with a great idea and then realized that the idea only lasted half an hour on screen or what but they really messed up Retaliation. When I talked about spending most of their money on advertising, they started playing the trailer in theaters over a year before it came out and it really paid off. Retaliation made $371 Million. This obviously tells me Paramount got what they wanted and Chu knows what he's doing.

Though the movie made an outrageous amount of money, It wasn't worth the $13 dollars a ticket or even half that. G.I. Joe Retaliation was so short it had me out in time for lunch and I will not be recommending it to anyone. I think the franchise again gets a new director and maybe puts some thought into the film, instead of whipping the cameras out and realizing at best, they can call it is a short film. When this happened, they added the useless fillers so they could actually call it a movie. As this is my biggest review so far, I hope you can tell I put a lot of thought into it and that my score reflects that.