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seriousficI know I’m probably going to get savaged for saying this, but storywise, GI Joe has a lot that works. However, there’s also a lot that doesn’t work. That’s what I’d like to fix.
The Destro prologue is all well and good, but let’s supplement or replace that with the Duke and Ana flashback, moved up. Duke still asks Ana to marry him and it’s all still very not going to last, but we get a bigger meeting with Rex (and a better name for him). He’s a CIA spook and pretty intense. He seems chagrined to find out Duke’s marrying his sister, who he’s very protective of. Since their parents died, he stepped in as a sort of surrogate father. Instead of the super-subtle foreshadowing of the original, Ana asks Rex to bring Duke home alive.
Cut to four years later and the film’s opening. In the course of the standard “I can’t wait to get home and see my wife” Army banter, someone asks Duke if he’s married. Ripcord runs interference. Then Cobra attacks and the plot continues.
So by this point, Duke and Ripcord have joined the Joes. Let’s pause a moment and turn that awkward, clichéd romance between Scarlett and Ripcord into some comedy bits where “ladies man” Ripcord tries to seduce Scarlett and she shoots him down for some screwball comedy that has to be an improvement over “I DON’T BELIEVE IN EMOTIONS.” Plus, it sets up a shocking twist ending.
Instead of the scene with Scarlett boohooing getting a scar, how about Snake Eyes patching her up? She comforts him about Storm Shadow as he coldly sharpens his blade. “I know you two used to be close. When the time comes, you can’t hesitate.” Pan over to Duke on the other side of the locker room, looking at a picture of him and Ana together. Cue flashback.
Some generic third-world country. Rex tells Duke that if he hurts Ana, he dies. Rex seems to mean it. Welcome to the family.
After passing through a spooky ‘test site’ for the nanites on human tissue (i.e. people), Duke’s team finds the lab. Thermal scan shows no one inside. The Marines find themselves underattack, so Rex goes in alone.
Duke tries to laser-paint the bunker, but his device is busted. Rex shows him how to rejigger the laser sight on his pistol to paint the target.
The airstrike that was supposed to come in five minutes shows up in one. Rex is blown up. At the funeral, Duke can’t think of anything to say to Ana before she slaps him. She says she never wants to see him again. Duke is left standing in the rain, not knowing what to do.
Baroness and Storm Shadow attack, get repelled by the Joes but get away with the warheads. Nothing wrong there, though we might as well change it to remove Cover Girl’s death. It just says that Storm Shadow doesn’t kill women… so what? Just having Zartan disguise himself as a Joe and then attack Hawk is villainous enough, no need to get rid of one of the, like, four female Joes.
So they track Baroness to Paris, where she pretends to be Storm Shadow’s hostage to get her husband to weaponize the warheads, thus giving her being a Baroness an actual point (because if Destro minds her having sex with her husband so much, why go to that trouble just so she can bust into the particle accelerator and put a gun to his head?).
Big chase. Duke saves Paris, but gets captured when he can’t bring himself to kill Ana. He’s taken to Destro’s ice fortress, where Destro shows him a mile-long railgun that can be hidden under the ice. “Just something I’ve been building on the weekends.” It’ll launch the warheads into parablic orbit, so when they come down no missile defense can stop them. And just to be mean, they hang Duke in the middle of it so he’ll be torn apart when it fires.
Rex reveals himself and gets in some gloating. The air strike was no accident. As a black-ops veteran, he knew too much. They were trying to shut him up. And when Duke abandoned Ana, Rex was there for her. There, much better reasons for taking over the world than “I like science!”
Duke calls Ana over to hear his last words. He asks her to come back to him, but it’s four years too late. He asks for one last kiss and gets it, managing to palm a hairpin in the process. Destro orders the railgun to fire.
By this time the other Joes have arrived. Using they snowmobiles, they harry the railgun into lowering under the water. Noting the miles-long melt in front of it, Scarlett deduces it’s already been fired. Ripcord steals a jet to go after the warhead while the other Joes attack.
Destro decides a simple headshot will do for Duke, just as our hero picks the lock and drops. He rushes a guard, grabs a gun, but is quickly pinned down. Out the glass walls, Duke sees a Joe submarine captained by General Hawk (so we have a reason to care what happens to that submarine) attack. He rejiggers his laser sight and paints the winch mechanism, which Heavy Duty picks up on. His squad blasts it, causing the entire railgun to swing down and crack on the seafloor. It begins to fill with shark-infested water.
Cobra has Duke outnumbered, pinned down just above the water (ankle-deep and rising), when Scarlett rappels down and starts busting heads with her crossbow. She tosses a gun to Duke. Storm Shadow (at the top of the railgun) is about to cut her line when Snake Eyes intercedes. He tosses Hard Master’s medallion (which was awarded to him in flashback, prompting Storm Shadow’s final murderous rage) to Storm Shadow’s feet.
What follows is an amazing multilevel fight. While Breaker guides Ripcord after the warheads, and Heavy-Duty dogfights, the Joes fight Cobra in a gunbattle where everyone must constantly climb to avoid shark attack. And above it all, a ninja duel on the rim of the railgun’s entrance. Stray shots narrowly miss the ninjas. Torpedoes hit the walls and let in new deluges. Vipers hit by Scarlett’s arrows are pinned in place. Their blood drips into the water, driving the sharks into a frenzy that has them thrashing right out of the water.
Snake Eyes slashes over Storm Shadow’s eye and the wounded ninja rips off his bloody mask. He yields to Snake Eyes, who lets him live. Storm Shadow pulls a gun and shoots Snake Eyes repeatedly. Snake collapses, bleeding badly. Storm Shadow grabs hold of Snake Eyes’ mask. “You took a vow of silence, so I can’t hear you scream in agony. But I won’t be denied the look on your face as I send you to hell.”
Suddenly, his eyes widen. Scarlett has shot him in the back. He falls over the edge and plummets into the water, where the sharks tear him apart.
The battle rages on. Snake grabs Scarlett’s line and runs down it, slashing the Vipers off the now-vertical floor in a PG-13 kinda way. The water becomes a red feeding frenzy. Rex and Ana abandon Destro, who keeps trading fire with the Joes. He has a good bolthole. Duke blasts the wall behind him, flooding Destro into a severed power cable. He’s electrocuted. Duke says he still has an ace up his sleeve, so Snake Eyes fishes him out and they evac. Before they leave, Breaker programs the railgun to fire a conventional warhead straight down. The explosion punches the base right through the ice cap.
So Rex and Ana get away to take control of Mars Industries with Rex’s big “Call me Commander” line. Destro is badly burned and knows nothing about where his bank accounts have gone. Rex has been planning this a long time.
In Washington, Hawk is briefing the President, who asks if Destro provided any actionable intel. Hawk nods, then punches the prez out! (Sure to get bipartisan cheers.) Zartan says he’s willing to make a deal.
Cut to the real President being recovered. He thanks all the Joes. In other news, Ripcord decides to simply asks Scarlett out, but finds her in a passionate embrace with Snake Eyes (hey, it worked in Star Trek). We get a look at Snake’s gin before Scarlett pulls his mask down and says she likes the strong, silent type.
Back in Destro’s hospital room, a doctor fiddles with his IV. “You were so short-sighted, Mr. McCullen. You wanted to take over the system, when it’s obvious the system has to be torn down. Still, the Commander might still have some use for you.” We realize in short order that the doctor is Zartan (or possibly Ana in a gratuitously sexy nurse outfit) and the injection is nanites. As Destro’s skin turns to metal, we smash cut to black.
The Destro prologue is all well and good, but let’s supplement or replace that with the Duke and Ana flashback, moved up. Duke still asks Ana to marry him and it’s all still very not going to last, but we get a bigger meeting with Rex (and a better name for him). He’s a CIA spook and pretty intense. He seems chagrined to find out Duke’s marrying his sister, who he’s very protective of. Since their parents died, he stepped in as a sort of surrogate father. Instead of the super-subtle foreshadowing of the original, Ana asks Rex to bring Duke home alive.
Cut to four years later and the film’s opening. In the course of the standard “I can’t wait to get home and see my wife” Army banter, someone asks Duke if he’s married. Ripcord runs interference. Then Cobra attacks and the plot continues.
So by this point, Duke and Ripcord have joined the Joes. Let’s pause a moment and turn that awkward, clichéd romance between Scarlett and Ripcord into some comedy bits where “ladies man” Ripcord tries to seduce Scarlett and she shoots him down for some screwball comedy that has to be an improvement over “I DON’T BELIEVE IN EMOTIONS.” Plus, it sets up a shocking twist ending.
Instead of the scene with Scarlett boohooing getting a scar, how about Snake Eyes patching her up? She comforts him about Storm Shadow as he coldly sharpens his blade. “I know you two used to be close. When the time comes, you can’t hesitate.” Pan over to Duke on the other side of the locker room, looking at a picture of him and Ana together. Cue flashback.
Some generic third-world country. Rex tells Duke that if he hurts Ana, he dies. Rex seems to mean it. Welcome to the family.
After passing through a spooky ‘test site’ for the nanites on human tissue (i.e. people), Duke’s team finds the lab. Thermal scan shows no one inside. The Marines find themselves underattack, so Rex goes in alone.
Duke tries to laser-paint the bunker, but his device is busted. Rex shows him how to rejigger the laser sight on his pistol to paint the target.
The airstrike that was supposed to come in five minutes shows up in one. Rex is blown up. At the funeral, Duke can’t think of anything to say to Ana before she slaps him. She says she never wants to see him again. Duke is left standing in the rain, not knowing what to do.
Baroness and Storm Shadow attack, get repelled by the Joes but get away with the warheads. Nothing wrong there, though we might as well change it to remove Cover Girl’s death. It just says that Storm Shadow doesn’t kill women… so what? Just having Zartan disguise himself as a Joe and then attack Hawk is villainous enough, no need to get rid of one of the, like, four female Joes.
So they track Baroness to Paris, where she pretends to be Storm Shadow’s hostage to get her husband to weaponize the warheads, thus giving her being a Baroness an actual point (because if Destro minds her having sex with her husband so much, why go to that trouble just so she can bust into the particle accelerator and put a gun to his head?).
Big chase. Duke saves Paris, but gets captured when he can’t bring himself to kill Ana. He’s taken to Destro’s ice fortress, where Destro shows him a mile-long railgun that can be hidden under the ice. “Just something I’ve been building on the weekends.” It’ll launch the warheads into parablic orbit, so when they come down no missile defense can stop them. And just to be mean, they hang Duke in the middle of it so he’ll be torn apart when it fires.
Rex reveals himself and gets in some gloating. The air strike was no accident. As a black-ops veteran, he knew too much. They were trying to shut him up. And when Duke abandoned Ana, Rex was there for her. There, much better reasons for taking over the world than “I like science!”
Duke calls Ana over to hear his last words. He asks her to come back to him, but it’s four years too late. He asks for one last kiss and gets it, managing to palm a hairpin in the process. Destro orders the railgun to fire.
By this time the other Joes have arrived. Using they snowmobiles, they harry the railgun into lowering under the water. Noting the miles-long melt in front of it, Scarlett deduces it’s already been fired. Ripcord steals a jet to go after the warhead while the other Joes attack.
Destro decides a simple headshot will do for Duke, just as our hero picks the lock and drops. He rushes a guard, grabs a gun, but is quickly pinned down. Out the glass walls, Duke sees a Joe submarine captained by General Hawk (so we have a reason to care what happens to that submarine) attack. He rejiggers his laser sight and paints the winch mechanism, which Heavy Duty picks up on. His squad blasts it, causing the entire railgun to swing down and crack on the seafloor. It begins to fill with shark-infested water.
Cobra has Duke outnumbered, pinned down just above the water (ankle-deep and rising), when Scarlett rappels down and starts busting heads with her crossbow. She tosses a gun to Duke. Storm Shadow (at the top of the railgun) is about to cut her line when Snake Eyes intercedes. He tosses Hard Master’s medallion (which was awarded to him in flashback, prompting Storm Shadow’s final murderous rage) to Storm Shadow’s feet.
What follows is an amazing multilevel fight. While Breaker guides Ripcord after the warheads, and Heavy-Duty dogfights, the Joes fight Cobra in a gunbattle where everyone must constantly climb to avoid shark attack. And above it all, a ninja duel on the rim of the railgun’s entrance. Stray shots narrowly miss the ninjas. Torpedoes hit the walls and let in new deluges. Vipers hit by Scarlett’s arrows are pinned in place. Their blood drips into the water, driving the sharks into a frenzy that has them thrashing right out of the water.
Snake Eyes slashes over Storm Shadow’s eye and the wounded ninja rips off his bloody mask. He yields to Snake Eyes, who lets him live. Storm Shadow pulls a gun and shoots Snake Eyes repeatedly. Snake collapses, bleeding badly. Storm Shadow grabs hold of Snake Eyes’ mask. “You took a vow of silence, so I can’t hear you scream in agony. But I won’t be denied the look on your face as I send you to hell.”
Suddenly, his eyes widen. Scarlett has shot him in the back. He falls over the edge and plummets into the water, where the sharks tear him apart.
The battle rages on. Snake grabs Scarlett’s line and runs down it, slashing the Vipers off the now-vertical floor in a PG-13 kinda way. The water becomes a red feeding frenzy. Rex and Ana abandon Destro, who keeps trading fire with the Joes. He has a good bolthole. Duke blasts the wall behind him, flooding Destro into a severed power cable. He’s electrocuted. Duke says he still has an ace up his sleeve, so Snake Eyes fishes him out and they evac. Before they leave, Breaker programs the railgun to fire a conventional warhead straight down. The explosion punches the base right through the ice cap.
So Rex and Ana get away to take control of Mars Industries with Rex’s big “Call me Commander” line. Destro is badly burned and knows nothing about where his bank accounts have gone. Rex has been planning this a long time.
In Washington, Hawk is briefing the President, who asks if Destro provided any actionable intel. Hawk nods, then punches the prez out! (Sure to get bipartisan cheers.) Zartan says he’s willing to make a deal.
Cut to the real President being recovered. He thanks all the Joes. In other news, Ripcord decides to simply asks Scarlett out, but finds her in a passionate embrace with Snake Eyes (hey, it worked in Star Trek). We get a look at Snake’s gin before Scarlett pulls his mask down and says she likes the strong, silent type.
Back in Destro’s hospital room, a doctor fiddles with his IV. “You were so short-sighted, Mr. McCullen. You wanted to take over the system, when it’s obvious the system has to be torn down. Still, the Commander might still have some use for you.” We realize in short order that the doctor is Zartan (or possibly Ana in a gratuitously sexy nurse outfit) and the injection is nanites. As Destro’s skin turns to metal, we smash cut to black.
