GI Joe: Retaliation (2013)

When it's over, all brawn and no brains – exactly what I was expecting. When the G.I. Joe team is terminated by order from the president (Jonathan Pryce), the surviving members must defeat Zartan (Arnold Vosloo) and his followers in order to save humanity. Don’t see this film if you are a Joe fan. You will be sorely disappointed. And if  you just want to see some action, I would still say “skip it” or be warned, because the action was mindless. Bruce Willis, Dwayne Johnson, and Channing Tatum couldn’t rescue this film. Actually, both Willis and Tatum were in less than 20 percent of the film, leaving Johnson to carry all the weight. He did the best he could with the poor script and was the main reason why I sat through this film. (There is something about Johnson, that even in the worse films, he makes it tolerable.) The want-to-be love story between Joes, Flint (D.J. Cotrona) and Lady Jaye (Adrianne Palicki), felt forced into the storyline and served no purpose to move the plot forward. Popular characters, like Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee) and Snake Eyes (Ray Park), were not exercised to their fullest potential. The fight choreography were not bad, but poor editing made them look too “planned out.” Also, I thought Storm Shadow died in the first film, Rise of Cobra? He showed up in Retaliation with no explanation on how he survived. If Retaliation was supposedly the continuation of Rise of Cobra, there was nothing concrete linking the two films, except for the presence of the characters. Retaliation was not complete fodder. It did have one memorable scene, the scene when Snake Eyes and Jinx (Elodie Yung) try to escape from the ninjas on the ice capped mountains of Asia. That scene was done well, lasting about 15 minutes, and was something different entirely, perhaps the only gem in the entire film.

My rating: 2 out of 5