I’ll admit it, I was pretty skeptical when Jon M. Chu was announced as the director of G.I. Joe: Retaliation. After all, this was the guy responsible of some of the Step Up movies and the Justin Bieber concert/biography. Fast forward a couple of months to a year later with the release of the first trailer and I was sold on it.
Fast forward to 2013 and after a couple of reshoots and a post-conversion to 3D, was it worth the wait? I can safely say “yes”, but it isn’t without its problems. We’ll get to that, eventually.
Retaliation picks up shortly after the events of The Rise of Cobra, with Duke now in charge of the elite covert-ops unit with “new” and familiar faces Roadblock, Flint, and Lady Jaye. Zartan is still posing as the U.S. president and uses his position to frame the Joes and order a strike which wipes out all but a handful of them, thus setting the entire movie in motion.
I actually liked The Rise of Cobra when it first came out in 2009. For all the complaints I had, it was still a pretty enjoyable, albeit silly, action movie. Retaliation takes things in a slightly more grounded and stripped-down direction (hello, smaller budget), which I definitely think helped in the long run.
That isn’t to say that Retaliation lacks in the action department. There’s a healthy amount of it here, including the mountainside ninja battle featuring Snake Eyes and Jinx that’s been heavily featured in the movie’s promotional material. The battle that takes place during the film’s third act leaves a little more to be desired though, even if it was supplemented by some pretty awesome vehicular combat.
In terms of performances, I’ll just go ahead and say that Jonathan Pryce’s sort of dual role as Zartan and the real U.S. president was the best part of the movie. Seeing him as the fake president being a dick to pretty much everyone he encounters, including various world leaders, is a joy to watch. Dwayne Johnson delivers as Roadblock, which kinda makes you wish they brought him on board for the first movie, and Ray Stevenson is a delightfully demented Firefly. Adrianne Palicki and DJ Cotrona just seem to be along for the ride, however. And finally, Bruce Willis chimes in with some cynicism that surprisingly works for his turn as Gen. Joe Colton, the man the G.I. Joe unit got its name from.
Retaliation‘s connection to the first film is one if its best strengths and yet, pretty much its biggest weakness. A ton of plot holes are gonna be brought up in the movie’s first half hour or so that’ll have you occasionally going “Wait, then what about…?” Not only that, having the RZA show up as the Arashikage’s Blind Master and Jinx’s near non-presence in the story are some pretty baffling filmmaking choices.
Despite all that, I ended up liking Retaliation more than Rise of Cobra. I think Jon M. Chu knows what he’s doing, despite being held back by a bafflingly middling script from the guys behind Zombieland, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick. I’d like to see more of his take on the franchise, given that he gets more funding and less studio meddling. And yes, as silly as this may sound, I’m actually putting my faith in the director that cared enough to take the stupid lips off of Snake Eyes’ costume and put Cobra Commander back in a reflective mask.
(Image from Yahoo! Movies)