Boiling Point: Yo Joe!

Posted by Robert Fure (robert@filmschoolrejects.com) on August 10, 2009

bp-gijoe

You’ve got to respect anyone who will do battle with Cobra, the enemy, over land and air, and who stays til the fights done.  Yeah, that’s a whole ton of G.I. Joe theme lyrics meshed into a sentence, so what?  G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra has come to theaters and done reasonably well, snagging about $56million in the face of a lot of bad buzz.  This boiling point is about G.I. Joe but it’s not about the movie.  Truth be told I haven’t managed to see it yet due to prior obligations this weekend, namely drinking beers with Dr. Ken in a Paramount Studios parking lot, watching The Goods and then sitting down with Jeremy Piven.  Oh, how hard my life can be.  No, this boiling point addresses a few issues surrounding G.I. Joe that could be spread out among several boiling points but screw it – let’s hit them all now.

G.I. Joe is in theaters and apparently it doesn’t suck.  I’ll make my own mind up soon once I see it, but the overwhelming critical response is that it’s a fun movie.  Light hearted, based on toys, a bit lacking in the plot department, but boy is it fun to watch things blow up!  Positive rating.  That reminds me of another movie this summer, hmm, what was it.  Something light hearted, not too serious, based on a toy line, a little light in the plot department, but damn it was fun to watch shit blow up.  Oh yeah, Transformers Revenge of the Fallen, a movie that the critical body made messy diarrhea on for being immature, light on plot, and none too serious.  Hold the fucking HISS Tank a minute – how is it that G.I. Joe is praised while Transformers is shunned when they’re the same type of movie and they’re being described almost exactly the same?  Sure there are differences and you can hate or love either movie for whatever reasons.  But can you really hate Transformers for being light on plot, heavy on action but then love G.I. Joe for the same reason?  Smells fishier than a San Diego taco stand to me, sir.  Sounds like something is amiss.  If we’re using the same measuring stick, how can one movie be six inches and the other be dog shit?  I don’t get it.  I think people are just being stubbornly unfair to Michael Bay, still, because they believe it to be cool.  Whatever.

A second issue I have surrounding G.I. Joe is this idea that the people who really liked G.I. Joe somehow did all along and everyone who thought it was going to be shit are some sort of haters.  Hold the fucking phone.  Everyone thought G.I. Joe was going to suck.  There was no conspiracy, just a giant pile of shit with a post-it note on it that said “Yo Joe.”  Flashback to 2007 when a rewritten draft of the script is reviewed at LatinoReview, the grade: F.  Yeah, a lot of shit changed from that draft, not that we knew.  Recall back to the first image released – Snake-Eyes.  Fucking awesome.  Everyone was pretty amped.  Then came the rest with their G.I. Joe pajamas and Breaker wearing a boombox on his chest.  Total pile of dog crap.  Cue up the first trailer where guys in robot suits pranced around Paris.  Yo No!  Up until about a week or so ago, all the trailers for G.I. Joe looked like bad CGI and accelerator suits.  Everyone and their mother who paid attention to the genesis of this movie was worried.  Very few people were excited, at most they were indifferent and willing to check it out.  Now the movie hits and its not the shitfest we expected, which is great – I’d rather love a movie than hate it, but let’s be real here, there is no Nostradamus who knew this was coming.  The writing was on the wall and it was spelling out ‘trouble.’  Were we wrong in thinking the movie was bad?  Yeah – but we made the best deduction possible based on the evidence we had.  When we called bullshit on Wolverine and said it looked like shit, and it turned out to be shit, where was the uproar then?

Of course we talk about and review and criticize and praise movies before they come out.  We’re constantly bombarded with images and trailers and teasers and this and that.  Should we remain silent?  Of course note.  The real bullshit though are those who would pretend like they knew all along G.I. Joe was going to be fun.  Show some posts to back that up and maybe I’ll buy it, but I don’t know what you saw in those images and that trailer.  Everyone was surprised by Joe, to be surprised at how not shitty something is, you have to have gone in thinking it was shitty.

So take a fucking chill pill and relax a little.  G.I. Joe is entertaining, awesome.  A lot of us, myself at the forefront, thought it was going to blow monkeys based on everything that was released before hand.  No crime in that.  You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but if you look at the cover, read an excerpt and hate the author, its not entirely out of the question to start reading with some doubts in your mind.  Further, can we not show Transformers at least a little love?  If you’re going to praise the Joe flick as light hearted summer fun that doesn’t need to be serious, can’t you at least acknowledge that Transformers was the same thing – it wasn’t out to redefine cinema, it just wanted to blow shit up – and it did.  So I’ll check back in once I’ve seen the movie and at the very least post my thoughts on Twitter.  In the mean time, judge everything on the same scale and keep your history straight or I’ll be accelerated past my boiling point.

Can’t get enough of Robert Fure’s rants? Get them in real time on twitter: Twitter.com/RejectRobert. Also, check out the Boiling Point Archive.


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  • benjackson
    "the overwhelming critical response is that it’s a fun movie."

    Have you checked Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic lately? It's getting only slightly better reception than Transformers 2. I'm not sure where you're getting this idea of an overwhelmingly positive critical response.
  • rpaine
    the response to G.I. Joe has been a lot more positive than Transformers 2, and the reason it's so low on RT is because it counts most of the mixed reviews as negative and still it's running at 39%, whereas Transformers is at 20%. The general consensus is that it's a fun movie, but it's stupid, so it falls in the middle of the scale, 39 is not a terrible score when using RTs rating method.
  • benjackson
    Even taking Rotten Tomatoes issues into account, I still don't see the response as generally positive, let alone overwhelmingly so.
  • I don't trust Rotten Tomatoes all that much, much of the people they choose for their pool are out of touch, small town paper writers. My opinion/observation on the critical response was more focused on the online community. But I don't think there is an argument against the idea that GI Joe is more well received, by far, than Transformers.
  • benjackson
    Yeah, the general response is not AS negative as Transformers, certainly. And if you're basing it on the online critical community, then I can definitely understand where the impression that the response was generally positive came from. Print journalists still seem to be pretty down on the movie, though.
  • gholson
    TRANSFORMERS 2 is a movie that consistently chooses the crudest, rudest approach at all turns, while almost daring you to like with a bullying tone. GI JOE is lighter, more innocent, and less bogged down with pretension, with a tone that walks the edges of camp.
  • Aleric
    I stand by this discription of the movie, "it was going to blow monkeys".
  • mergedloki
    Both transformers 2 and GI joe were are horrible movies with plot holes you too big to be patched up.

    So the answer is no. NO love for transformers or joe.

    But out of the two G.I. Joe is by FAR the lesser of 2 evils.
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