Movie Review: 'G.I Joe Origins: Snake Eyes'

I respect the people who put in the effort to make movies. I recognize the Herculean task of trying to form words, actions, captured in image, into a fashion that is coherent and satisfyingly entertaining for mass consumption. What these people do is nothing short of a miracle. That said, when images fail to cohere and my time is spent enduring the incoherent, I get frustrated, and I feel the need to write about that frustration.

The new Hasbro toy rendered as a ninja movie, G.I Joe Origins: Snake Eyes is the most recent source of my frustration. The film stars Henry Golding as the title character, Snake Eyes, a young man who watched his father murdered and lived for years with the guilt of not being about stop that murder. We then cut to 10 years in the future wherein Snake Eyes’ traumatic childhood takes on an obviously cathartic metaphor in Snake Eyes being pummeled in some sort of unsanctioned MMA fight. Even though he wins the fight there is a strong sense he intentionally accepted much of the bludgeoning.

Following the fight, Snake Eyes is approached by a mysterious man named Kenta (Takehiro Mira) who offers him a job. Kenta is a front for the Japanese mafia and is also moving guns for the terrorist organization Cobra. When Kenta finds a spy in his operation he asks Snake Eyes to perform the spy’s execution. Snake Eyes refuses and this sets off a fight scene that may or may not be well choreographed and performed.

I say may or may not because even though I watched this battle with my own two working eyes, I could hardly see the action. Director Robert Schwentke chooses to make use of a camera style in this and other remaining action scenes in G.I Joe Origins: Snake Eyes that has the camera slipping, slamming and panning, constantly moving as if we were in the fight ourselves. I understand the kinetic intent but the execution is a complete failure.

The man Snake Eyes saved from Kenta’s execution attempt is Tommy (Andrew Koji). Indeed, Tommy was a spy for a secretive clan of ninjas that fight organized crime in Japan. Since Snake Eyes saved Tommy’s life, Tommy claims to owe him a life debt and thus brings Snake Eyes into his cloistered world. Snake Eyes will be invited to become a ninja if he can pass three trials. Let me tell you that just having Asian actors acting out the same cliches, American notions of ninjas and honor codes and so on, does not make these scenes any more palatable.

One thing that so many of these kinds of movies do, mostly through the need to expedite production and simplify storytelling to a degree a child could follow, is create faulty devices with grave importance to the plot. In the case of G.I Joe Origins: Snake Eyes, the plot turns on a mystical, glowing, heart shaped rock that gives the person holding it the ability to blow stuff up and turn people into ash just by pointing it at their enemy.

Once the main baddie gets his hands on this device and shows what it can do, the movie is over, or it should be. It’s not hard to divine that this device was hastily crafted by a screenwriter who was not asked to show their work before this went into production. Quality control on this device was not a high priority. Once the villain has this heart shaped glowing rock and doesn’t use it to blink the good guys out of existence the plot is exposed and we’re kicked out of the movie. All we can think about is why this idiot bad guy doesn’t use his all purpose rock to end this fight. The only answer is that it is because he is a character in a movie and the plot needs him to be stupid and not use his plot device.

What exposes this as lazy screenwriting is how easy it would be to solve this problem. Just include a scene in the movie that shows the rock’s power has a limitation. Maybe it affects the person who uses the rock when they use it, they get weak from it perhaps. Maybe the rock runs out of magic when it is used and has to take a few minutes to power up again. These excuses that could be revealed in dialogue or visual form would simply cover why the all powerful device doesn’t end the battle immediately. Instead, the main baddie appears to be an idiot who just refuses to use his power to end the battle.

It’s one thing for a Hollywood blockbuster to be lazy, we’re used to that and willing to forgive some lazy devices if we are given something cool to make up for it. But to be this lazy is insulting. This is a disrespectful level of laziness. They were not even trying to make this work. They knew they needed a macguffin to drive the plot and instead of putting any thought or effort into it, they came up with this and didn’t bother to make sure it made even a remote amount of sense.

There are other examples of the lazy execution of G.I Joe Origins: Snake Eyes but there is no need for me to belabor the point. G.I Joe Origins: Snake Eyes screams its pointlessness and irrelevance from it’s title alone. This failed attempt at a franchise makes Space Jam A New Legacy seem like a more noble pursuit of the art of film. At least that movie might entertain small children. G.I Joe Origins Snake Eyes has the temerity to be both lazy and a mercenary attempt at capitalizing on existing I.P, Hasbro’s patented G.I Joe line of toys. At least the soullessness of Space Jam A New Legacy was nakedly terrible, G.I Joe Origins: Snake Eyes wants to actually make you believe that it is a movie and not a corporate commercial tie-in. At least Space Jam was an honestly soulless exercise in brand expansion.