Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins

If you are looking for the G.I. Joe style storytelling and action this may disappoint. It's a very different style and kind of predictable in many ways.

Bland and forgettable martial-arts thriller that delves deeper into the character but outside of Henry Goulding who was good in the role, there's not much else to the film. The rest of the cast wasn't terribly charismatic and Samara Weaving talents is completely wasted in a small supporting role (shows up basically for the third act). I don't know, while the first two GI Joe films weren't very good, there were a few entertaining moments, this one I found pretty boring for the most part, worse yet, the fight scenes suffered from bad editing and poor lighting. **2.5/5**

I actually liked the two first G.I. Joe movies, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and G.I. Joe: Retaliation. This one… not so much. It could have been a really good movie but it ended up as a huge disappointment. The story should have been a cool revenge story but it ended up being a convoluted mess making Snake Eyes one of the bad guys for most of the movie. It is also hugely predictable after the first 20 minutes of the movie. Did the writers really think that the “twists” would come as a surprise for anyone? They probably did since Hollywod writers usually reside on the low end of the intelligence scale nowadays. Putting three of those hacks together to write a movie doesn’t help of course. I could have accepted all of that if the rest would have been cool with lots of fights and special effects. Sadly the movie is mediocre, at best, in these areas as well. Snake Eyes is not only a bad guy but he is rather stupid as well as devoid of any charisma. His acting is quite poor which can be said for most of the actors actually. Apart from the mediocre acting there’s really no one in the movie that you feel like rooting for. No one stands out, everyone just excels in mediocrity. The only person in the entire movie that has any coolness factor worth talking about is Scarlett but she is not in the movie for more than a few scenes. There are a few scenes with some special effects, cars flipping over, huge snakes etc. but not really that much for this kind of movie. That could have been fine since this movie should be a lot about martial arts. Amazingly enough, not even here does it deliver. Most of the martial arts scenes involve a lot of flipping around with arms and swords but they mostly look like they have been written for a PG rated TV show for teens and pre-teens. They are simply poor. Tommy looks like he needs to take a dump before every fight with that ridiculous pose of his. This is not a 1-star movie as some rate it. That’s just ridiculous. It has some entertainment value. However, it could have been so much better. Unfortunately I suspect this movie has done the G.I. Joe franchise a disservice for some time to come.

It's one thing offering us Henry Golding as a pretty chap you'd want to take home to meet your mother, it's quite another telling him to abstain from shaving for a few days and hope that turns him into a convincing, highly trained ninja! That's what is in store for us here as this latest GI Joe spin off presents our hero as the rescuer of the heir of an ancient Japanese clan - "Tommy" (Andrew Koji). Once he is thoroughly ingratiated with this noble family, it transpires that old "Snake Eyes" has an agenda all of his own - and it's not exactly honourable! The rest of the film follows a well trodden path of suspicion, betrayal, reconciliation and - of course - loads of epic looking sword fighting and gravity-defying action scenes. As with so many films in this genre, way too much emphasis has been placed on the look of the thing - the characters are instantly forgettable, the plot thinner than any rice paper could ever hope to be and the ending dragged this, quite unnecessarily, over the two hour mark. It needs a big screen to do the photography and visuals justice, but maybe just pay daytime rates?