Ratings for reviews will appear above the fold, while the review itself will appear below the fold to avoid spoilers for anyone that wants to go into it with a blank slate.
Jean-Paul’s rating: 2/5 stars
Good action. Bad plot. Ugly dialogue.
“G.I. Joe: Retaliation” actually starts out pretty strong. You get the feeling that you are in for a fun buddy movie wrapped up in an unlikely world domination plot. There is real chemistry between Duke (Tatum Channing) and Roadblock (Dwane Johnson). They play off of each other really well and you really feel like the two are close friends. But then the writers decide to kill off Duke. Why do you kill off one of the only people in the movie that has chemistry in the first half hour? Doing so lost the only thing that the movie had going for it.
The rest of the movie consists of action scenes interspersed with pigeonhole views into the lives of characters that we couldn’t care less about. Snake-eyes must capture Storm Shadow to pay for a murder he comitted as a kid. Really cool chase/fight scene on the side of a mountain. Lady Jaye seeks the approval of her dead father who really sounds like a dick. Team attempts to assassinate the president. Joe Colton (Bruce Willis) is a dick to Lady Jaye for no real reason. Team saves the day.
There is one lesson that should be learned from this movie. If you only have two people in a movie that have charisma, do not kill one of them near the beginning of the movie.
I think you are much too kind with the 2 star rating. You also must not have heard…all of those good scenes with Duke were why the movie was delayed to begin with. The money grubbing producers were going to kill him off much earlier, but then saw how popular Tatum became after Magic Mike so they wanted to expand his role.
The whole movie was an exercise in greed and cynicism. It felt like the ‘writer’ just delivered an outline for a script to a strict director who wouldn’t let anybody but the guy who played the President/Zoltan adlib around it.