G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra A Movie Review	MPAA Rated - PG-13 It's 1:58 Long A Review by The Dude on the Right

It makes me sad because I was actually looking forward to the movie, having been a fan of the TV cartoon back in the late 1980’s, and actually having G.I. Joe’s when I was a young lad. I was hoping it would rise to the level of “Transformers” quality, but sadly, for me, the movie just seemed to try to do way too much, explain too much, and take way too many liberties because the movie was “set in the not so distant future.”  I suppose I’ll start with some of the plot.

We find out quickly that there is evil afoot, thanks mostly to an ancestor of an arms dealer from the 1600’s, and he has developed these nanomites that will eat metal until, well, forever, or they get disarmed, and they are perfect for a military weapon because that way they can somehow fall into the hands of the bad people.  Yup, the nanomite missile warheads get stolen, and wouldn’t you know it, Duke (Channing Tatum), a military bad-ass, and his partner Ripcord (Marlon Wayans), who were supposed to protect them, are now recruited into a super-duper military squad called G.I. Joe.  What they don’t know yet, and neither does the government, is that our head bad guy is hell-bent on world domination; he thinks he’s in control, but actually he’s just a pawn in a smarter man’s game of world domination.

And so, for two hours, we get a lot of violence, chasing, and not really creative jokes to try to carry through some semi-futuristic action, like these suits the Joe’s can wear so they can run fast, jump higher, and get hit by a truck and come up smelling like a rose, all the while we also get flashbacks, flashbacks, and more flashbacks explaining the origins of nearly every character that might be important to the story.

Okay, I agree, this review is sort of disjointed so far, but it’s only because, for a change, I’m at a loss of how to describe this movie, other than two hours of stabbings, chasing, shooting, and bloated action that seem to not really want to tell a coherent story without using way too many flashbacks that keep interrupting the stabbings, chasing, shooting and bloated action.

Look, for an end of summer movie, one with mindless violence, “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” sure does it’s job, but for me, in a way that is just too over the top.  Sure, the Joe’s need some cooler weapons than the plain-jane military, Cobra needs to be a little dastardly, but somewhere between the stabbings, chasing, shooting, bloated action, and flashbacks, the movie just forgot how to have fun.

I guess there are some folks who will like the movie and be able to follow it, but me, I didn’t care for it, and getting back to little Skippy, he just seemed to be totally lost because along with the stabbings, chasing, shooting, bloated action, and flashbacks during the movie, I was also treated to “Is that G.I. Joe?”, “Is that G.I. Joe?”, “Is that Snake Eyes?”, “Is that Storm Shadow?”  “Are they brothers?”, “Who is she?”, “Is that Cobra?”, “Who is that?”, and my favorite, yet  again, “Is that G.I. Joe?”  Yup, little Skippy kept asking his mom those questions, to which she just constantly “Shushed” him for two hours.  Yay, more bang for my movie-going buck.

So, in the end, it’s 1 ½ stars out of 5 for “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” for all of the reasons stated above, and also because I thought the ending Cobra Commander mask wasn’t nearly as cool as the cartoon TV show.  Part of me really hopes the movie doesn’t make the money necessary to warrant a sequel, especially since the end of this one left it so wide open we know they want to make one anyway.

That’s it for this one!  I’m The Dude on the Right!!  L8R!!!