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seriousficSo everyone remember that GI Joe movie? Sure, it was stupid, but in a fun way, not in a way that was offensive and generic and grim and gritty. There was some stuff they got wrong, so glaringly obvious I really don’t have to go into it (the plot) but on the whole, it could’ve been a lot worse.
Case in point…
While GI Joe was in development, there were several different drafts of the script. One in particular made its way to the internet, and brother, it is awful. So awful, I feel the need to tell you about it. Sure, none of it made its way to the screen, but it’s very existence offends me, sort of like reality television. So here we go with Skip Woods’ draft of GI Joe.
We start off in Hong Kong, where your standard Hans Gruber wannabe sophisticate villain (hums Beethoven, listens to Pavarotti) blows it up with a micronuke. Okay, so what’s the problem there? Well, for one, it doesn’t have all that much to do with the plot. They barely even mention it. It doesn’t really set the tone either, or do anything to establish the guy’s character. It doesn’t even give him a name, the script just refers to him as “Cool Dude.” Really? That’s the best you could come up with? It’s GI Joe! The universe is full of people with names like “Destro” or “Storm Shadow”. Couldn’t you just Google “GI Joe bad guy” before you start writing your script?
Anyway, before he does the deed he shoots some people, I guess to frame them (since the authorities will obviously find a bunch of people headshot where the nuke was launched from and think “a-ha! They must’ve not been able to live with the guilt!”). Whatever. He also quotes Shakespeare for no reason.
COOL DUDE
Hell is empty. All the devils are here…
[…]
The Tempest… William Shakespeare. Playwright.
What does that mean? You can’t just throw a random quotation in because it sounds cool. It doesn’t make your villain look sophisticated or urbane, it just makes your story seem pretentious.
So now we go to the GI Joe guys (though they’re never called that) doing a mission against an African warlord. You know how in a lot of action movies, there’s a big action sequence before the real story begins to establish the movie, or just have a cool action setpiece without having to justify it? Well, this is like that, only it just keeps going and going until you eventually realize that this is the movie. Which is too bad, because it’s both incredibly complex and yet unengaging, and introduces us to the characters in a really stupid fashion. Imagine if Ocean’s 11 began with the good guys pulling a heist, without us getting a chance to know them or have any build-up. It’s just a bunch of shooting and scheming, with no hint of what any of the characters are trying to accomplish.
Even more weirdly…
The first SOLDIER HEARS something and turns but Duke lifts his weapon and shoots him in the chest, the round sparking blue on impact. The soldier falls, convulsing.
Our heroes use tasers? It’s a grim and gritty revenge fantasy where the heroes use tasers? Why don’t you have them set phasers to stun while you’re at it? I get that maybe you’re not allowed to show people getting killed in a kids’ movie, but there’s a lot of other stuff that’s much worse! Why not just let the heroes use guns while they’re fighting the forces of evil? Who complains about that!
Then we cut to an expensively appointed bedroom where said African warlord is… ummm…
As music wafts from the speakers he turns again to the bed, his smile widening. Undoing his robe, he drops it to the floor, now wearing only boxers with these little red hearts on them.
The General slides under the covers…
GENERAL AKALI
Come here my love…
He pulls back the covers to reveal…
A serious looking man wearing white, high-tech battle armor. He raises up, holding a silenced weapon on the General.
SNAKE EYES
Sorry, not tonight General. You have a headache.
How do I begin? The entire reason Snake Eyes is memorable and cool, the entire reason you would include him in a movie in the first place, is that he doesn’t talk! And he’s got the mask and the scars, that’s cool too. But he especially doesn’t make stupid cutesy quips like that. Why not have Jason Voorhees run something through and then say “I think he got the point”? Or have Spock suddenly enter a breakdancing competition as long as you’re taking everything that’s distinctive and intriguing about a character and flushing it down the toilet so he’s just another face in the crowd. Maybe someone doesn’t think a completely silent ninja who everyone calls Snake Eyes would work in a serious movie, but then why are you making a serious GI Joe movie? That’s like making an X-men movie where everyone goes around calling each other Scott and Logan and Erik, and they don’t have powers, they just get into fistfights and do parkour. What’s the point?
But wait, I swear to God, this character will get even stupider.
So Snake Eyes knocks the General out (by shooting him with a little bullet that has a tranq dart in the center, glad to see that ninja training is coming in handy) and lugs him out to a Humvee. And we meet more characters who have no distinguishing characteristics or are introduced in a way that makes them at all engaging. For the record, Heavy Duty and Flynt show up, although Flynt might just be typo since he’s introduced in dialog.
And then we go back to Duke and “Alex Mann”. There’s almost too much stupidity to categorize here, so I’ll go one by one. Okay, we know Duke, generic square-jawed leader. Alex Mann is from the European version of the toyline, where it’s called Action Man. He’s not really part of the mythos, he’s just been thrown in so the movie can be sold overseas to people who take issue with all that “A Real American Hero” business. Which begs the question, why make a GI Joe movie if you have to compromise it so much just to get it made? Why not make literally anything else? Make Gumby, everyone loves Gumby. Did they really think people would fall for this? Why not just resign yourself to pissing a few people off instead of pissing everyone off? Do you really want the money of people who are going to be offended by a bunch of American soldiers killing terrorists?
It’s like when The Golden Compass came out. They took out all the atheist stuff, so that pissed off the atheists because the movie had no balls, and it still pissed off the Christians because it was still based on something that mocked their beliefs, and the movie itself was just generic fantasy bullshit. If they didn’t want to offend anyone, you’d think they would pick a book that wasn’t made with the intention of offending people. Or, hell, done something original. Ask Phillip Pullman to come up with the idea for a fantasy movie with a theme that isn’t “man, religion is stupid!”
So, anyway, Alex Mann is there for some reason, and he and Duke are talking about Hong Kong getting nuked. Oh, right, that’s in the movie. We’re told both that “a back-alley, Chinese religious fringe cult” got the blame for that (of course, why else would they be lying around where the nuke was launched, with bullet holes in their heads?) and that the whole world is going mad because “the Chinese are blaming the Russians for the Incident. The Russians are blaming the US. The US is blaming Iran…”
Really? Didn’t you just say that a Chinese cult did it? Can’t you make sense for two consecutive paragraphs, script? Please?
Apparently not, because now we move onto (great segue here!) a love triangle. Oh, motherfuckers.
ALEX
(sighs)
Neither one of us ever talks about it. But doesn’t it strike you as weird that we’ve both dated the same girl for almost two years? Same girl.
DUKE
(grins)
Does it go against your proper English sensibilities?
ALEX
Well yeah… I mean, it’s definitely immoral. But that’s not it. Why…? Why won’t she choose?
DUKE
Ask her.
ALEX
I have…
(beat)
She loves you, you know.
DUKE
And you.
No, don’t fight that feeling of nausea, they are talking about Scarlett. I don’t even know how this works and the script never goes into it. Is Scarlett dating one of them but fucking the other? Are they in a threesome? An open relationship? Is she continually breaking up with one and hooking up with the other? God forbid we get a scene that introduces this dynamic instead of just having the characters talk about being in a love triangle. And two years? Really! At this point, someone should nut up and either get out, make a move, or have a threesome.
Is this really the best dynamic they could come up with to motivate the movie? Why not say, I don’t know, have a female character whose importance isn’t solely based on where her vagina is?
Fuck it. I need to save some bile for later.
Then we got to Hi-Tech (who, naturally, is only described as “a man in his mid twenties”) who is of course the hacker that every action movie needs. And he’s naked, but fuck it, at least that implies a personality. He does some shit. Then we go to Scarlett and finally get a character introduction.
A beautiful young woman, not yet thirty, turns toward us. With her perfect body and long red hair one might be tempted to use the word ravishing. Tempted. Her eyes reveal that there is something darker, harder, beneath the supermodelesque exterior.
Ah, the male gaze is a wonderful thing, no? Okay, so blah blah, they’re going after the General (no, not the one Snake Eyes just captured, a different one) because they think he brokered the arms deal between the Russians and the Chinese cult. Scarlett goes into meet with General Ayoob (sounds like something Scooby Doo would say) as the old ‘prospective client’ trick. He tells her that it wasn’t him, it was the Naja, an arms dealer urban legend. I guess he's supposed to be this universe's version of Cobra Commander, but why not just use Destro? His name's portentous enough already, and he actually is an arms dealer.
But what’s so interesting about that when Duke and Alex can argue about politics and who’s sleeping with each other?
ALEX
Don’t lecture me about her. You want the truth, I’ll tell you the truth. I think working for those CIA vultures has screwed up your view of right and wrong.
DUKE
We’re soldiers Alex. We don’t question. We do.
ALEX
Is that what we were doing in Belgrade? Or in Istanbul. Being soldiers? We have the most advanced toys, no congressional oversight, and a no questions asked, no bag limit hunting license on whoever the CIA and DOD deem as bad guys. But in reality, we’re nothing more than a high-tech kill squad.
Actually, since this is the one time they’re kidnapping a guy instead of killing him, and Ayoob is trying to sell arms like, right now, to one of them, as they’re talking, you’d think he’d have less problems. Or that he could pick a better time to express them than in the middle of a mission, when his girlfriend is talking to the psychotic arms dealer. I guess this is supposed to make the story sophisticated and morally ambiguous and subversive, but it just comes off as whiny and petulant. Duke is a stormtrooper and Alex is Casper The Friendly Assassin. Oh, and they’re both complete pussies when it comes to women. Why should I like any of these people?
HI-TECH
(over implant)
Gentlemen, you know you are live. Perhaps this isn’t the best time… I feel like I’m in high school.
Gentlemen, the naked computer geek just scored a point on you. Shouldn’t that be grounds for a court martial?
ALEX
What I’m telling you is that I love her. And you are going to end up getting her killed. All of us. And for what? Truth, justice and the American way?
Duke stares at him.
ALEX
Do you love her?
DUKE
I think your feelings for her are screwing up your head. Of course I love her.
ALEX
You admire her, but do you love her?
(beat)
Like you loved your first wife.
Did the writer decide to plagiarize a soap opera? It’s a GI Joe movie, why am I hearing about Duke’s first wife? And believe me, this never comes up again. You’d think there’d be a scene where Duke’s first wife had some bearing on the plot or his character, but no, it’s just there.
Slow down for a minute, set some of this up with actual scenes (you know, dialogue, settings, actions?) instead of having people shout about it between gunfights. I know Mission Impossible 3 had a scene where Tom Cruise and Ving Rhames are talking about relationships while they’re running an op, but all that stuff had already been introduced and so cross-referencing the two plot threads made them stronger instead of more confusing. We knew what they were trying to do, we knew who Tom Cruise was involved with, we knew who the bad guy. Here, everything is getting thrown on the screen at the same time, in no order, so it just becomes a bunch of bullshit. It’s like if Star Trek began with the Klingons attacking the Enterprise, and in the middle of the fight Spock and Kirk are talking about their friendship and Bones is talking about the Prime Directive. It’s too much!
Oh, and Duke and Alex (how come Alex doesn’t get a cool code name? Everyone else does.) have high-tech body armor.
Thin and very tight, the best description would be a white, ribbed wet suit, this is the most advanced experimental military armor in the world.
Anyone else just picture the full-body condoms from Naked Gun? Oh, and Scarlett is wearing one under her clothes. Good thing no one searched her when she went to visit the well-protected crime lord. That could’ve been embarrassing.
By the way, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this writer, Skip Woods, has the worst punctuation. Look up there, those are two complete thoughts and they’re only separated by a comma. At least use a semi-colon, you fuck!
Oh, and I guess Flynt is a character in this. As is WILLIAM. So I guess half the team has codenames and the other half just goes by Fred. And of course there’s no difference given between Hi-Tech and Heavy Duty and William. Is it William Shatner? There’s nothing here that says it isn’t William Shatner.
On a sidenote, Flynt is a really gay way to spell Flint. Doesn’t that sound like someone Adam Lambert would dance with?
So they use the first general to fake an attack on the second general, and blah blah. Honestly, we’re thirty pages in and this is still all backstory-y. It’s such a weird feeling, because I’m not following any of this. It’s just going from action sequence to action sequence, and I guess they’re introducing the characters and setting up the plot, but it’s taken thirty minutes and they just now got to William. They really could’ve used a briefing scene. And they could’ve had a scene where we saw that Duke was in a love triangle with Alex and Scarlett instead of just telling us. At the very least, they could’ve shortened this sequence so that all the characters got a brief spot and then we moved on. I’m just saying, half an hour and they’re not even done introducing all the characters yet!
And another thing. Why is Alex in a love triangle with Scarlett and Duke? Why not Snake Eyes? That’s how it is in the comics and on the cartoon. They gave him a voice and a face, so now he can “compete” with Duke. And he’s the second most prominent character anyway, he should be the second male lead.
Speaking of Snake Eyes being able to talk…
DUKE
(Yelling over the noise)
None of this gets to you, does it?
SNAKE EYES
(Shrugs)
When it’s your time… You know?
ALEX
(Shaking his head)
Goddam Buddhist.
Who could bear to keep him from expressing scintillating dialogue like that? And so far, we’ve established that Alex hates polygamists and Buddhists. How could this guy possibly be more unlikable?
Alex pauses and looks over at Duke, then grins.
ALEX
By the way… I’m going to ask Scarlet to marry me.
Duke looks like he just took the brunt end of a concussion grenade. Huh? I didn’t know grenades had ‘ends’, much less brunt ones. Alex shrugs and goes through the door low, firing. After a millisecond, Duke is all pro, and follows him in.
EXT. CUPOLA – DAY
Scarlet just stands there a moment dumbfounded. She is at a loss.Dumbfounded AND at a loss? Guess she read the script too.
SCARLET
Did you just ask me to marry you over a com-link in the middle of a fire fight?
[…]
ALEX
(Firing, yelling)
Romantic isn’t it…?
Yes, I think we all swooned a little when you did your best to distract your supposed best friend and lover while bad people were shooting at them. Oh, and you are still concerned about shit like the oligarchy and the CIA and cycles of violence and did you know 10% of the population consumes 90% of the world’s resources and they’re all Republicans? For fuck’s sake, man, it’s called Ritalin. Ask your doctor about it.
Oh, and I know the idea here is that all the characters are introduced in action (except for Flynt and William, I guess), but Heavy Duty isn’t even doing anything. He’s just loading a big gun that Hi-Tech is shooting remotely. That’s not very heroic.
Finally, forty minutes in and we’re done with the opening. So Scarlet punches Alex for proposing to her… physical violence, always the sign of a healthy relationship… and Christ, he’s known her for two years and he says he’s in love with her, you’d think he’d know that she’d be pissed off by this.
But now that they’ve captured Ayooby-dooby-doo, some UN guys led by slimy bureaucrat Ryan (wow, original. He’s Duke’s boss) show up to tell them that Ayoob’s being taken into protective custody. Well, that’s awkward. You’ve gotta imagine they’d shuffle their feet a little after killing two hundred mooks to get to him. Of course, they all deal with this like seasoned professionals.
DUKE
If those men don’t stop moving, you’ll be taking them back to Virginia in black plastic.
SCARLET
Are you of your goddam mind?
RYAN
Watch your mouth, Miss.
ALEX
Be careful, Bureaucrat. Real zinger there, Alex.
RYAN
You get no assurances. You do your job. That’s it. You’re a high tech mailman with an M-16 and delusions of grandeur.
DUKE
I said stop moving!
Duke’s men are pointing weapons at everyone.
DUKE
Either he gives up those weapons right here, right now. Or I will bury him on this mountain top.
ALEX
Duke, I was just talking shit earlier. This is not our call.
SCARLET
Let it go, sweety. Our job’s done.
ALEX
Did you just call him sweety?
Is everyone here twelve? And for some reason, Duke goes completely psycho. He shoots Ayoob and Ryan’s men with ”piezoelectric rounds”, and even blasts Alex, although really, that one was probably overdue. Then Scarlet gets him to stop (apparently she was the one who thought that Ayoob knew where the possibly imaginary nukes were, very convenient) with the old “do it for me” gag. So Duke stops being psycho as quickly as he started and lets Ayoob go. But someone hacks their machine gun and shoots down Ayoob’s plane. Not looking too good for Duke.
So a year later, Duke’s lecturing about the Tet Offensive to… some second graders. Well, I suppose it’s good that he’s not going jail time for disobeying direct orders, shooting his fellow soldiers, and murdering someone (accused). But couldn’t he get a job as a military contractor, or a consultant, or a policeman? How far down the ladder do you have to go to end up teaching second grade? That’s not really a skillset you see, performing assassinations and educating eight-year-olds. But hey, if they mouth off, he can always blast them with electric bullets.
But hey, remember Snake Eyes? Well, earlier he used experimental eye drops to give him enhanced vision, but he complained that they hurt his eyes. Now guess what?
Snake looks at him a moment, then removes his shades. He squints up at Duke. We can now see his eyes. His pupils have changed. They are thin, vertical black lines crossing his iris.
Yes. Snake Eyes, who can talk, has literal snake eyes. That is some stupid bullshit right there. I wanna waft in that. It takes effort to be that stupid.
So we’re left with two possibilities. First, his real name is Fred or something and now that he has snake eyes, people call him Snake Eyes. That must make a great nickname, being reminded of his painful deformity. What do they call the paraplegic Joe, Wheels?
Or, he’s always been called Snake Eyes, and by an insane coincidence, he got actual snake eyes. Maybe later Duke will marry a Duchess and become Duke Duke.
So Snake Eyes is visiting Duke to give him an invitation to Alex and Scarlett’s wedding. That seems a bit petty. I mean, Duke freaks and gets kicked out of the military, so she punishes him by marrying Alex? IDK, they’re both assholes, she should really just go on Match.com or something. Hell, she’d bound to find a better quality of man on Craigslist, even.
Am I wrong for thinking that all of these scenes would be more interesting if Snake Eyes couldn’t talk? If he just showed up and handed a wedding invitation to Duke and the scene was just Duke playing off him? That’d be really interesting. Maybe Snake Eyes could hold up a sign now and then, like “Stop being an asshole”. That sign would come in handy. Oh, least ominous phrase ever put to paper?
Cool Dude, the guy who fired the nuke, stands up and starts to walk the other way.
And hey, it’s fifty pages in, why not introduce some antagonists? The movie’s only half over.
His attention is clearly on a stunning blonde woman on the other side of the room. Her designer gown is backless, and we can see tattooed across her whole back a large stylized image of a cobra. This is the BARONESS ANASTASIA.
Admittedly, her character gets handled better here than in the real movie, but still. She’s blonde? And a huge cobra tattooed on her back, that’s great for a covert operative. Why not give her an eyepatch and a hook too, make her really noticeable. And a big T-shirt that says “I hate good guys.”
So Alex is there (he’s now heading a counterterrorist team in Europe, since GI Joe disbanded, although it was never called GI Joe, so the movie GI Joe isn’t actually about GI Joe, it’s about a bunch of fuck-ups, Jesus God make it stop). He’s interested in the Baroness (although she’s called Anastasia in the script) because she’s the mistress of the Angel, yet another arms dealer. He just happens to be at a party when he notices her. And Ryan is there too, so Alex ignores the arms dealer babe to insult his old boss. Asking what the hell his boss, a high-profile bureaucrat, is doing at a Foreign Ministry Ball. I don’t know, maybe he was invited?
So anyway, banter banter banter, then the Baroness gives Alex a card with “HOW MUCH $$$ DO YOU WANT THE ANGEL?” (sic. Very, very sic) written on it. You know, somehow I can’t picture the refined, elegant Baroness writing $$$. Why not draw a little stick figure of a dead Angel and a smiley face while you’re at it?
Then (oh for God’s sake) we cut to a bunch of UN people with names like “Ambassador,” “Powerful woman,” and “Dignified man” discussing someone who’s offering the identity of the Naja (no, not the Angel, totally different arms dealer) in exchange for one hundred million dollars (and, presumably, sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads) and a drug that will stop an outbreak of a disease in Africa. Wow, how intrig-yawn.
Then there’s a scene with Duke and Scarlett and they still love each other, but she also loves Alex. And none of the characters develop or reveal anything we don’t already know. But hey, more exposition! The Angel is working for the Naja, so that’s why they’re cutting the deal with yet another guy who can identify the Naja, and, umm… oh, hey, Ryan was at the same party as the Angel’s mistress. What an odd coincidence? Or, not, since, you know, Alex was there too. Does that mean Alex is working for the Angel?
But hold onto your butts, it’s about to get stupider.
POV: DRESSING ROOM
All we can see is Scarlet’s hand, splayed open on the ground. The wall is flecked with blood.
Alex RUNS to Scarlet’s side, picking her limp body up in his arms. Trying to do something. Anything.
But Duke already knows. It’s too late…
Oh, BARF.
Now, I’m not one to see sexism in everything. Even Gail Simone, who invented the term “women in the refrigerator,” wasn’t objecting to characters being fridged, just that it happened to women more than it did to men. That’s why they’re called supporting characters, because their relevance is how they affect the main characters. So if Superman’s story is best served by, say, Lucy Lane falling off a cliff, well, tough shit, the name of the comic is SUPERMAN, not LUCY LANE.
But this? This is fucking sexist. There’s only two women in this story. One of them’s martyred and the other is an evil bitch. More than that, Scarlett is the female lead. You think about heroines in GI Joe, Scarlett is what springs to mind. Killing her is like doing a Justice League movie where Wonder Woman dies so Batman and Superman are really pissed off at the bad guy. Or having a Star Wars movie where Leia dies so that Luke and Han are extra angry at Vader.
Moreover, it’s just unnecessary. You don’t need to kill off their girlfriend to get Duke and Alex involved in fighting Cobra. That’s their job!
Really now, let’s think about what Scarlett did in this story. She was lusted over by both Duke and Alex, and she got murdered to motivate them. You could save money on an actress and replace her with a rare Mickey Mantlo rookie card. Think about it. Both Duke and Alex really want that baseball card, but after Ayoob dies, Duke is demotivated and Alex is the one who bids the highest on eBay. Then, when it arrives in Alex’s mailbox, he discovers that it’s been cut apart to spell “Cobra rules!” Sure, the baseball card doesn’t have “supermodelesque looks,” but you could throw in a blonde in a bikini to walk around for a few minutes. She’d have as much impact on the story.
Of all the stories you could tell with GI Joe, why would you tell this one? There are already hundreds of stories with this exact same plot! We don’t really have that many badass female commandoes in cinema, so it would actually be more original to have Scarlett do literally anything else! You’re not doing anything new or interesting with the story, you’re just turning it from one cliché into another, more sexist cliché. Shame, shame, shame.
Need I say that we’re at the page sixty mark, halfway through the movie, and only now is the plot finally getting started?
So there’s a funeral and everybody’s sad and Snake Eyes says it was meant as a warning. I guess the bad guys have never seen an action movie before. “Let’s kill the wife and good friend of a highly-trained commando unit. What are they going to do about it? Hunt us down and kill us? The idea!”
Then we go to Cool Dude (ugh! Zartan! Dr. Mindbender! Firefly! Pick one of those!) kills the ambassador that we saw for, like, five seconds trying to pick up Ayoob and later talking about the deal to find out who the Naja was. And they’re framing some of the ambassador’s political enemies for it. It’s an hour in and we still have no idea who the bad guys are or what they’re trying to accomplish. Or how the good guys intend to fight them!
Okay, I’m getting bored. So the good guys go rogue (obviously) and kidnap Ryan, since Duke got a photograph of Scarlett meeting with Ryan and on the back was written “Ayoob is alive, Ryan is lying.” Because isn’t that what we all want to see in a GI Joe movie, political intrigue? Not bothering at all to think it might be a trick, the guys and Alex (who is coping with Scarlet’s death by drinking himself into a stupor… an action hero who gets really drunk, never seen that before) start beating Ryan up and insisting he tell them what’s going on. So Ryan (calling people dude, which is really inconsistent with how the character is about to “develop”) reveals that he was working with Scarlet, and that Ayoob didn’t die because he never got on the plane. In fact, he rushed back to New York to tell Ross that he loved him.
So Ryan says that Ayoob is the Angel, that there’s no Naja, and that Angel/Ayoob killed Scarlett. Excuse me while I reel from all the shocks. And Alex, who five minutes ago was going to kill Ryan to find out what he knew, suddenly says that Ryan teaming up with Duke is illegal and they have to go through the proper channels and get clearance and what’s your vector, Victor?
Duke points out that that worked out so well the last time, in so many words. And so on until it’s another dick-measuring contest over Scarlett. She’s dead, boys. Let it go. Alex also says that he knew Scarlett better than anyone. Yes, that was why she punched you in the face when you proposed to her. And then it gets really stupid.
ALEX
You want me to tell you? You’re the worst America has to offer. A bully that makes up his own rules as he goes, based on your own emotional ethics. Huh? You don’t think the law applies to you. You and men like you are the reason the US is hated by the rest of the world. You’re a blunt instrument. And Scarlet knew it. When I asked her to marry me, I wasn’t sure I had a chance. But you sealed your own fate with that stunt with Ayoob. You will never change and she knew it. Which’s why she ran to me. In the end, I’m, not even sure she still loved you--
I should hope not, seeing as she was marrying you. That’s right, folks, it’s a soap opera, it’s a subversive look at American foreign policy post-9/11… it’s not an action movie, but hey, why should there be action in a movie called GI Joe?
Now okay, maybe some of you are saying that a political action movie could work. After all, the Bourne films were okay, and so was Dark Knight. But this develops that plot in the most silly, irreverent, tasteless manner. It basically turns into a buddy cop, only instead of “one’s black, one’s white” or “one’s Chuck Norris, one’s a dog,” it’s one believes in torturing people and the other’s a pussy. Not that engaging.
The problem here is that an action movie is, and will always be, a fantasy, and this is trying to turn that fantasy into the more mature war drama, which is probably a bad idea when your movie is based on a toyline. We go to action movies to see people get their asses kicked. Even though in real life, we know that violence is a bad thing and it’d be better if we could talk through our differences, that’d be pretty lame in an action movie context. Does anyone really want to see James Bond stop the villains with trade sanctions and diplomatic condemnations?
So basically, this movie is asking us to root for the limp-dick police commissioner who’s telling the heroes to turn in their badges. It’s like watching Die Hard with Paul Gleason as the protagonist. He’s not the hero, in fact he’s getting in the way of stopping the bad guys and saving the day. It doesn’t help that this conflict is confused as all hell. We’ve got the justice versus vengeance thing, the security versus civil rights thing (technically), PLUS the old love triangle. There should be one central conflict, not ten. You wouldn’t want to see a movie where Batman has to fight the Joker, and conquer his drinking problem, and win Selina away from Superman, and come to grips with his latent racism, and learn to forgive his absentee father.
But anyway, Duke gets pissed off by that and punches Alex out, and they fight because they’re third-graders. Because while Scarlett may not have wanted them to kill her murderer (just once I’d like to see a fridged movie character leave a video will that says “Kill the motherfucker who got me”), she would definitely want them to flail at each other like cats in heat.
Fuck.
So Alex goes to meet with the Baroness about the Angel… because why would we want to see Duke’s roaring rampage of revenge when we can see people sitting down and dining? Of course, the Baroness gives him a verbal blowjob in public, since when has a villainess ever not used sex as a weapon? The Baroness says that she’s pretty much been whoring herself out to Ayoob, only now she wants to break up with him, so she needs Alex for protection. Yeah, right. A woman who’s a baroness in a GI Joe, that’s gonna end well. Well, actually, in the real movie…
Then Duke shows up and presses the Baroness for information, which she doesn’t have. So he leaves. That’s pretty much the entire scene, only without all the macho posturing and other bullshit. Thanks for advancing the plot, scene.
Then it turns out the ambassador’s aide… oh, God, we’re supposed to keep track of that guy? Sold him out to Cool Dude, although I don’t know why the bad guy would need inside information in order to break into someone’s house and kill them. So Duke and co show up at the restaurant he’s eating at and torture him into talking. Isn’t this the exact same scene we just left, just with someone named Bryce instead of with the Baroness? Alex shows up with his guys, and when Duke asks why he didn’t stop them from torturing Bryce, Alex says that hey, Duke got the information. So he’s a hypocrite and an asshole. Nice hero, script.
Duke escapes Alex, again, and they hijack the payment to Ayoob for his deal on the Naja’s identity. Uh, I think. I think Gosford Park had less characters to keep track of. Our heroes (antiheroes?) go to Tajikistan and find a “shitty third-world village” where everyone is poor and sick. Ayoob’s been hiding out here and he’s redeemed himself and now that his village is sick (which is what he needs the vaccine for) he’s at peace with being killed in exchange for their lives. Oh, how moving. This is a GI Joe movie, right?
Anyway, the script really pours it on with a ladle. Ayoob’s sick daughter is a polite little sweetheart, and his wife gets teary and kisses them on the cheeks, apparently not noticing that Duke’s holding a rifle and exchanging all this portentous dialogue with her husband. So Duke admits that he couldn’t have killed Scarlett… unless he’s manipulating them for his own ends like everyone else in the script, but okay, let’s roll with him being innocent… and apparently now he and Alex (who was waiting for them in the village) are on the same side again? Well, that was dramatic. This script is schizophrenic. It turns the little moments into these huge fistfights and shouting matches, then skates over the legitimately big moments.
Oh, and here comes the stupidest. The Baroness shows up (how did she get there? Hitch a ride?) and kisses Ayoob, who denies knowing her. Duke and Alex don’t find this at all suspicious, just chuckling over how he’s denying having a mistress because of his wife (although said wife didn’t notice the guy aiming a machine gun at her husband, so yeah). Now, given that the Baroness has said that Ayoob is a big bad arms dealer and she wants Alex’s protection just to break up with him, you’d think they’d notice the discrepancy between Couldn’t-Hurt-A-Fly-Ayoob and her Ayoob, being highly-trained counterterrorism experts and whatnot. Later, the Baroness actually kills Ayoob because no one bothered to question her. And who was the Angel, even? Just another name the Naja used?
What makes it even stupider is that there was no reason for her to risk blowing her cover. All she had to do was NOT walk up to Ayoob and kiss him and her chances for success would increase exponentially. You could say she’s just that cocky, but we haven’t seen that much of her character. In short, I have no idea what the point of this scene is, other than to establish that the Baroness is there.
Moving on. So Hi-Tech detects troop transports finding in and the Joes (should I even call them that?) grab weapons from Ayoob’s pissant armory. Oh, and he still has the nukes, so I guess he was partly responsible for blowing up Hong Kong. Still, his daughter is sick, so it’s okay! I bet a lot of people’s daughters got sick with radiation poisoning and died agonizing deaths, but screw ‘em, they’re off-screen!
Duke asks why Ayoob didn’t trade the nukes for the vaccine (this he picks to question?) and Ayoob says…
AYOOB
Despite what you think of me, I am not an evil man.
No, you’re just one of those nice guys who collects nuclear warheads. Okay, why not say to some legitimate government “I have ten nuclear warheads. Give me this vaccine or I’ll sell them to a rogue state”? Since he knows that trading the Naja’s identity would get him killed, right? Wait, hold on…
DUKE
So you decided to trade the identity of the Naja instead?
AYOOB
It seemed the most prudent. I had proof, insurance, all my financial dealings with the Naja’s organization over the years. It was in a Information Bank in Hong Kong. Heavily fortified. Impossible to break into. Unfortunately one of my partners chose that building as a testing ground for… and my proof evaporated.
Wait, what? WHAT? I thought he decided to trade the Naja’s identity a year after Hong Kong got nuked! Is he saying he doesn’t know who the Naja is? And what an unbelievable coincidence! This script isn’t just not making sense, it’s manufacturing nonsense.
So the Joes (?) fortify the village. And yeah, I guess Alex and Duke have mended fences. Glad we wasted time with that whole subplot about them not getting along, seeing as how it was entirely pointless. We could’ve just skipped all that and had Scarlett alive, going after the Naja/Angel/Ayoob/fuck-you with them. And on page 108, we finally get to an action scene. Let me just page back and see when the last fight was…
Holy shit, page 37! That’s seventy-one pages, OVER AN HOUR OF SCREENTIME (one page equals one minute), between the action in a GI JOE MOVIE. WHAT IN THE ACTUAL HELL!? They couldn’t come up with one scene involving armed conflict between then and now? You know, the bad guys are trying to do something bad and the good guys are trying to stop them? Or the good guys want to accomplish something and they have to get through the bad guys to do it?
You know what this script is? It’s a bullshit sandwich. There are these thin slices of action and in between them is a big steaming heap of flavorless intrigue, stupid conflict, sexism, and just plain stupidity. There’s no villain, there’s no conflict, there’s barely even a plot. I have no idea why anyone considered this story worth telling, even the writer! What else has this guy, Skip Woods, done?
X-Men Origins: Wolverine? Hitman? Swordfish? Oh fuck me, The A-Team? They let this guy write the A-Team? Oh, wait, they got some other people… the guys who did Wanted? Fuck me sidelong.
So fight scene. Honestly, this all depends on the director, so I’ll skip it. Cool Dude shows up, so I guess he’s involved in all this… somehow… (why did someone want to blow up Hong Kong again? If it was the Naja, detonating a nuclear warhead seems like the best possible way to get attention, not a good idea when you’re trying to pass yourself off as an urban legend. Or was it just to destroy Ayoob’s proof? Because again, see above about attention.). And Cool Dude (vomit) has the GI Joe Super-Duper Armor from earlier.
Something weird… Alex brought some men with him, but they don’t have names and seem to be there mainly to soak up bullets. In screenwriting terms, don’t they just clutter the action? You’d think it would just be the heroes against the bad guys, not them and some nameless extras.
So anyway, the Joes (…I guess?) blow up the oil wells outside the town, which is sure to be good for the sickly villagers. I don’t know, you had warning of an attack, couldn’t you have told them to make a run for it or gotten them all to somewhere fortified? Whatever. The oil hits the invisible mercenaries and turns them visible, so hurray for that. Ayoob gets taken hostage by the obviously lying woman who had no reason to be there… who could’ve seen that coming?... and she says that she led the mercenaries right to them. Which, given the reveal of the Naja coming up, makes no sense. He pretty much had to have Ayoob’s location, and could’ve sent guys anytime he wanted.
Anyway, the Baroness ‘fesses to killing Scarlett… great, the one catfight in this script and it’s offscreen… but Alex just doesn’t get it.
ANASTASIA
You almost have it. Think… How would I know what the last word she uttered from her bleeding lips.
First, there’s no way that sentence is grammatically correct. Second, geez, Alex, you’re not playing Hangman, she’s telling you she killed your fiancé! She was hoping to tell him in bed, in fact, but that would be far too interesting to happen in this screenplay. The Baroness continues using Ayoob as a human shield…
ANASTASIA
Careful. All that emotion could affect your aim. You might hit Ayoob. Could you live with that?
Oh no! I accidentally killed the arms dealer who helped nuke Hong Kong! MY LIFE IS A LIE!
So she kills Ayoob and gets away with it-—really, why not just shoot him and then leave? Why bother taking him hostage and give the Joes time to run over?-—by the way, great job there Alex—and Ayoob’s dying words are that “The Naja… Is… Here…” Of course, he could just say “Ryan… Is… The… Naja…” and save everyone a bunch of trouble, but hell, why not be dramatic as you shuffle off?
Yes, it’s Ryan. He shoots Hi Tech in the back and then LOOKS OUT THE WINDOW as he speechifies. So, naturally, Hi Tech gets up and tackles him. I’m pretty sure I could recreate the entire Evil Overlord List just from reading this script. Shoot him in the head, you idiot! Don’t shoot him once and then turn your back on him while you can see he’s breathing!
Oh, and the script refers to High Tech as “Hi.” Between him and Cool Dude, this script is actually physically paining me.
So they fall out the window, Ryan gets up and leaves while High Tech plays dead. Which he did literally one second ago. God, what is this guy, ADHD? SHOOT THE FUCKER IN HIS HEAD!
So Duke goes to confront Ryan, who says that the GI Joes have been doing his dirty work for years… when did this become Alias? So four of Ryan’s men take Duke hostage. Good hustle, Duke.
RYAN
You must admit it was pretty slick.
DUKE
Why?
RYAN
Is this where I spill my guts and tell you everything, just before you kill me and my four heavily armed mercenaries?
Oh, so you’re not going to talk to him, you’re just going to shoot him then?
RYAN
Because you’re good. I knew you would find him. And I needed someone to blame it all on.
JESUS CHRIST!
Okay, so Ryan needed Duke as a scapegoat for Ayoob’s death, since how else could you explain an arms dealer dying in Africa? Here’s a thought, just kill Ayoob and say “oh, no, one of the ten million crazy fuckers with guns must’ve gotten him.” It’s Africa. Not exactly a low crime rate there.
But anyway, Ryan’s the villain… yes, our action movie has a bad guy, on the hundred and fifteenth page… and may I just say, no, not Ryan, how could you? We trusted you! Wait, no, you were the bureaucratic asshole everyone already disliked. So much emotional heft there. BUT ANYWAY, why is he doing all this?
I’m back at Langley before the weekend. Doing my job. Instigating my own little wars. Perfect.
WHY!? If your motivation is doing unscrupulous shit to protect America, you already have a black ops team going around killing bad guys. WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED? Bigger bullets? Is he going to use the nukes to blow up a rogue state? What is this guy’s plan? What are the good guys trying to stop him from doing? It seems like his big evil scheme is just to save his own skin.
So the mercenaries spring a trap while trying to find the nukes, which Duke hid… apparently he was onto Ryan, so I’m sure High Tech and the bullet in his gut appreciate the warning. Duke gets away.
Ryan is fucked up by the blast. The Baroness and Cool Dude help him back to the plane. Snake Eyes attacks, but apparently Cool Dude is a ninja, because he pulls out a sword and fights him. REALISM! Also, is there now any reason at all to not name him Storm Shadow? Apparently, he’s not Cobra Commander or anything, since that’s Ryan. Why not just make up a name, like Mr. Smith or something? Anything would be better than Cool Dude.
So Snake Eyes gets stabbed in the throat as he kills Cool Dude, severing his vocal cords, so he’s finally mute. Really, that should’ve happened in the opening. It’s like an X-Men movie where Cyclops only has to wear a visor at the end, and the rest of the movie he’s just looking around at everything like a motherfucker.
Oh, and Ryan and the Baroness get away. So the revenge movie ends in nobody getting any revenge. Zen. This is Screenwriting 101 here. If you’re going to sacrifice the female lead for a set-up, it should have a pay-off. There should be a big emotional, dramatic confrontation! But no, Duke and Alex just trade some banter with Ryan and the Baroness, then they part ways. It’s as unsatisfying as a chocolate-covered turd.
Even the characters comment on how weak this ending is (because when you go to see a GI Joe, it’s for a low-key, understated climax).
DUKE
So, Ayoob’s dead. The Baroness got away. Along with a hundred million dollars and the most notorious arms dealer on the planet, who it turns out I’ve been working for all along. And we destroyed an entire village in the process. Doesn’t sound so good…
Yeah, you suck pretty hard.
ALEX
True. But… we did get the nukes back. Yes, you stopped the bad guys from using them to… sell? And we uncovered the identity of the Naja, effectively putting him out of business. Yes, I’m sure everyone will believe the crazed vigilantes over the senior CIA agent. And that he won’t be able to sell weapons now that you know his name. Not to mention Ryan will be eating out of a straw for a very long time. I’m sorry, is it you or Duke that’s the violent brute again? And we saved all these villagers. They are being inoculated right now. That was more Ayoob than you. Really, you did more to fuck up his plan than anything else. And get him killed. I dunno, kinda seems like a win to me. If this is the intelligence community, no wonder the underwear bomber got through.
So they decide to get the GI Joes back together, even though they don’t call them that so what’s the point? And hey, all that conflict over civil rights and security? Why, just an excuse for banter, my good man!
ALEX
But…! We do it my way. No cowboy stuff.
We begin to CRANE UP.
DUKE
Of course.
ALEX
I’m serious, Duke. No bullshit. No torturing suspects, no breaking international law, no cutting side deals with the CIA, no killing people to right your own sense of morality--
Yes, God forbid soldiers KILL PEOPLE. I mean, what would the world come to? Then they banter about who’s tougher than who because God hates me.
Meanwhile, in an airport, the Baroness has dyed her hair black and wears horn-rimmed glasses. Because why not wait until the last fucking page of your script to have your characters actually bear a resemblance to the characters?
And as if the swordfight in a third-world warzone wasn’t an awkward enough fusion of the GI Joe mythos with boring Bourne Identity poser-ness, there’s Ryan’s new look.
Ryan has a white Teflon and titanium jointed mask screwed into his face. Not a mask really, but designed to set the bones in his crushed face.
Look, either go all the way and make a comic book movie, or do your own thing, but stop with this halfway bullshit. It’s just stupid. Speaking of stupid…
ANASTASIA
Now what…?
RYAN
I don’t know. I was kind of thinking world domination.
Since when is he motivated to do that? How does one go from arms dealer to dictator? And what was up with him having Cool Dude killing people? Is there one aspect of this character that makes any sense?
So they get away, presumably to fight in a sequel where the characters actually look and act like the real characters.
Basically, what this script does is take the GI Joe franchise and try to turn it into The Bourne Identity. That is to say, the same generic action/adventure crap that you can get from any movie, but with the GI Joe name slapped on it to appeal to some sick sense of nostalgia. If they really thought the story was that strong, why not strip away all the (really minor) GI Joe elements entirely and do something original, so the audience could go in without preconceptions? Didn’t they think the audience would wonder where Storm Shadow and Cobra Commander and all the other GI Joe stuff they remember were? Didn’t they think people would ask “hey, what does this have to do with GI Joe?” It’s not even a good Bourne Identity rip-off.
Look, a GI Joe shouldn’t be that hard. Everyone likes to see the US military blowing shit up, and since the enemy is COBRA, we don’t have to put up with any white liberal guilt. Just have COBRA doing something nefarious and GI Joe trying to stop them. That’s all we need, that’s all the finished film was, and that’s why it worked. This is too smart by half, thinks it’s a lot smarter than it is, and for fuck’s sake, Snake Eyes had snake eyes. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go into mourning for the A-Team movie. I thought that was going to be so boss when they cast Bradley Cooper as Face…
Case in point…
While GI Joe was in development, there were several different drafts of the script. One in particular made its way to the internet, and brother, it is awful. So awful, I feel the need to tell you about it. Sure, none of it made its way to the screen, but it’s very existence offends me, sort of like reality television. So here we go with Skip Woods’ draft of GI Joe.
We start off in Hong Kong, where your standard Hans Gruber wannabe sophisticate villain (hums Beethoven, listens to Pavarotti) blows it up with a micronuke. Okay, so what’s the problem there? Well, for one, it doesn’t have all that much to do with the plot. They barely even mention it. It doesn’t really set the tone either, or do anything to establish the guy’s character. It doesn’t even give him a name, the script just refers to him as “Cool Dude.” Really? That’s the best you could come up with? It’s GI Joe! The universe is full of people with names like “Destro” or “Storm Shadow”. Couldn’t you just Google “GI Joe bad guy” before you start writing your script?
Anyway, before he does the deed he shoots some people, I guess to frame them (since the authorities will obviously find a bunch of people headshot where the nuke was launched from and think “a-ha! They must’ve not been able to live with the guilt!”). Whatever. He also quotes Shakespeare for no reason.
COOL DUDE
Hell is empty. All the devils are here…
[…]
The Tempest… William Shakespeare. Playwright.
What does that mean? You can’t just throw a random quotation in because it sounds cool. It doesn’t make your villain look sophisticated or urbane, it just makes your story seem pretentious.
So now we go to the GI Joe guys (though they’re never called that) doing a mission against an African warlord. You know how in a lot of action movies, there’s a big action sequence before the real story begins to establish the movie, or just have a cool action setpiece without having to justify it? Well, this is like that, only it just keeps going and going until you eventually realize that this is the movie. Which is too bad, because it’s both incredibly complex and yet unengaging, and introduces us to the characters in a really stupid fashion. Imagine if Ocean’s 11 began with the good guys pulling a heist, without us getting a chance to know them or have any build-up. It’s just a bunch of shooting and scheming, with no hint of what any of the characters are trying to accomplish.
Even more weirdly…
The first SOLDIER HEARS something and turns but Duke lifts his weapon and shoots him in the chest, the round sparking blue on impact. The soldier falls, convulsing.
Our heroes use tasers? It’s a grim and gritty revenge fantasy where the heroes use tasers? Why don’t you have them set phasers to stun while you’re at it? I get that maybe you’re not allowed to show people getting killed in a kids’ movie, but there’s a lot of other stuff that’s much worse! Why not just let the heroes use guns while they’re fighting the forces of evil? Who complains about that!
Then we cut to an expensively appointed bedroom where said African warlord is… ummm…
As music wafts from the speakers he turns again to the bed, his smile widening. Undoing his robe, he drops it to the floor, now wearing only boxers with these little red hearts on them.
The General slides under the covers…
GENERAL AKALI
Come here my love…
He pulls back the covers to reveal…
A serious looking man wearing white, high-tech battle armor. He raises up, holding a silenced weapon on the General.
SNAKE EYES
Sorry, not tonight General. You have a headache.
How do I begin? The entire reason Snake Eyes is memorable and cool, the entire reason you would include him in a movie in the first place, is that he doesn’t talk! And he’s got the mask and the scars, that’s cool too. But he especially doesn’t make stupid cutesy quips like that. Why not have Jason Voorhees run something through and then say “I think he got the point”? Or have Spock suddenly enter a breakdancing competition as long as you’re taking everything that’s distinctive and intriguing about a character and flushing it down the toilet so he’s just another face in the crowd. Maybe someone doesn’t think a completely silent ninja who everyone calls Snake Eyes would work in a serious movie, but then why are you making a serious GI Joe movie? That’s like making an X-men movie where everyone goes around calling each other Scott and Logan and Erik, and they don’t have powers, they just get into fistfights and do parkour. What’s the point?
But wait, I swear to God, this character will get even stupider.
So Snake Eyes knocks the General out (by shooting him with a little bullet that has a tranq dart in the center, glad to see that ninja training is coming in handy) and lugs him out to a Humvee. And we meet more characters who have no distinguishing characteristics or are introduced in a way that makes them at all engaging. For the record, Heavy Duty and Flynt show up, although Flynt might just be typo since he’s introduced in dialog.
And then we go back to Duke and “Alex Mann”. There’s almost too much stupidity to categorize here, so I’ll go one by one. Okay, we know Duke, generic square-jawed leader. Alex Mann is from the European version of the toyline, where it’s called Action Man. He’s not really part of the mythos, he’s just been thrown in so the movie can be sold overseas to people who take issue with all that “A Real American Hero” business. Which begs the question, why make a GI Joe movie if you have to compromise it so much just to get it made? Why not make literally anything else? Make Gumby, everyone loves Gumby. Did they really think people would fall for this? Why not just resign yourself to pissing a few people off instead of pissing everyone off? Do you really want the money of people who are going to be offended by a bunch of American soldiers killing terrorists?
It’s like when The Golden Compass came out. They took out all the atheist stuff, so that pissed off the atheists because the movie had no balls, and it still pissed off the Christians because it was still based on something that mocked their beliefs, and the movie itself was just generic fantasy bullshit. If they didn’t want to offend anyone, you’d think they would pick a book that wasn’t made with the intention of offending people. Or, hell, done something original. Ask Phillip Pullman to come up with the idea for a fantasy movie with a theme that isn’t “man, religion is stupid!”
So, anyway, Alex Mann is there for some reason, and he and Duke are talking about Hong Kong getting nuked. Oh, right, that’s in the movie. We’re told both that “a back-alley, Chinese religious fringe cult” got the blame for that (of course, why else would they be lying around where the nuke was launched, with bullet holes in their heads?) and that the whole world is going mad because “the Chinese are blaming the Russians for the Incident. The Russians are blaming the US. The US is blaming Iran…”
Really? Didn’t you just say that a Chinese cult did it? Can’t you make sense for two consecutive paragraphs, script? Please?
Apparently not, because now we move onto (great segue here!) a love triangle. Oh, motherfuckers.
ALEX
(sighs)
Neither one of us ever talks about it. But doesn’t it strike you as weird that we’ve both dated the same girl for almost two years? Same girl.
DUKE
(grins)
Does it go against your proper English sensibilities?
ALEX
Well yeah… I mean, it’s definitely immoral. But that’s not it. Why…? Why won’t she choose?
DUKE
Ask her.
ALEX
I have…
(beat)
She loves you, you know.
DUKE
And you.
No, don’t fight that feeling of nausea, they are talking about Scarlett. I don’t even know how this works and the script never goes into it. Is Scarlett dating one of them but fucking the other? Are they in a threesome? An open relationship? Is she continually breaking up with one and hooking up with the other? God forbid we get a scene that introduces this dynamic instead of just having the characters talk about being in a love triangle. And two years? Really! At this point, someone should nut up and either get out, make a move, or have a threesome.
Is this really the best dynamic they could come up with to motivate the movie? Why not say, I don’t know, have a female character whose importance isn’t solely based on where her vagina is?
Fuck it. I need to save some bile for later.
Then we got to Hi-Tech (who, naturally, is only described as “a man in his mid twenties”) who is of course the hacker that every action movie needs. And he’s naked, but fuck it, at least that implies a personality. He does some shit. Then we go to Scarlett and finally get a character introduction.
A beautiful young woman, not yet thirty, turns toward us. With her perfect body and long red hair one might be tempted to use the word ravishing. Tempted. Her eyes reveal that there is something darker, harder, beneath the supermodelesque exterior.
Ah, the male gaze is a wonderful thing, no? Okay, so blah blah, they’re going after the General (no, not the one Snake Eyes just captured, a different one) because they think he brokered the arms deal between the Russians and the Chinese cult. Scarlett goes into meet with General Ayoob (sounds like something Scooby Doo would say) as the old ‘prospective client’ trick. He tells her that it wasn’t him, it was the Naja, an arms dealer urban legend. I guess he's supposed to be this universe's version of Cobra Commander, but why not just use Destro? His name's portentous enough already, and he actually is an arms dealer.
But what’s so interesting about that when Duke and Alex can argue about politics and who’s sleeping with each other?
ALEX
Don’t lecture me about her. You want the truth, I’ll tell you the truth. I think working for those CIA vultures has screwed up your view of right and wrong.
DUKE
We’re soldiers Alex. We don’t question. We do.
ALEX
Is that what we were doing in Belgrade? Or in Istanbul. Being soldiers? We have the most advanced toys, no congressional oversight, and a no questions asked, no bag limit hunting license on whoever the CIA and DOD deem as bad guys. But in reality, we’re nothing more than a high-tech kill squad.
Actually, since this is the one time they’re kidnapping a guy instead of killing him, and Ayoob is trying to sell arms like, right now, to one of them, as they’re talking, you’d think he’d have less problems. Or that he could pick a better time to express them than in the middle of a mission, when his girlfriend is talking to the psychotic arms dealer. I guess this is supposed to make the story sophisticated and morally ambiguous and subversive, but it just comes off as whiny and petulant. Duke is a stormtrooper and Alex is Casper The Friendly Assassin. Oh, and they’re both complete pussies when it comes to women. Why should I like any of these people?
HI-TECH
(over implant)
Gentlemen, you know you are live. Perhaps this isn’t the best time… I feel like I’m in high school.
Gentlemen, the naked computer geek just scored a point on you. Shouldn’t that be grounds for a court martial?
ALEX
What I’m telling you is that I love her. And you are going to end up getting her killed. All of us. And for what? Truth, justice and the American way?
Duke stares at him.
ALEX
Do you love her?
DUKE
I think your feelings for her are screwing up your head. Of course I love her.
ALEX
You admire her, but do you love her?
(beat)
Like you loved your first wife.
Did the writer decide to plagiarize a soap opera? It’s a GI Joe movie, why am I hearing about Duke’s first wife? And believe me, this never comes up again. You’d think there’d be a scene where Duke’s first wife had some bearing on the plot or his character, but no, it’s just there.
Slow down for a minute, set some of this up with actual scenes (you know, dialogue, settings, actions?) instead of having people shout about it between gunfights. I know Mission Impossible 3 had a scene where Tom Cruise and Ving Rhames are talking about relationships while they’re running an op, but all that stuff had already been introduced and so cross-referencing the two plot threads made them stronger instead of more confusing. We knew what they were trying to do, we knew who Tom Cruise was involved with, we knew who the bad guy. Here, everything is getting thrown on the screen at the same time, in no order, so it just becomes a bunch of bullshit. It’s like if Star Trek began with the Klingons attacking the Enterprise, and in the middle of the fight Spock and Kirk are talking about their friendship and Bones is talking about the Prime Directive. It’s too much!
Oh, and Duke and Alex (how come Alex doesn’t get a cool code name? Everyone else does.) have high-tech body armor.
Thin and very tight, the best description would be a white, ribbed wet suit, this is the most advanced experimental military armor in the world.
Anyone else just picture the full-body condoms from Naked Gun? Oh, and Scarlett is wearing one under her clothes. Good thing no one searched her when she went to visit the well-protected crime lord. That could’ve been embarrassing.
By the way, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this writer, Skip Woods, has the worst punctuation. Look up there, those are two complete thoughts and they’re only separated by a comma. At least use a semi-colon, you fuck!
Oh, and I guess Flynt is a character in this. As is WILLIAM. So I guess half the team has codenames and the other half just goes by Fred. And of course there’s no difference given between Hi-Tech and Heavy Duty and William. Is it William Shatner? There’s nothing here that says it isn’t William Shatner.
On a sidenote, Flynt is a really gay way to spell Flint. Doesn’t that sound like someone Adam Lambert would dance with?
So they use the first general to fake an attack on the second general, and blah blah. Honestly, we’re thirty pages in and this is still all backstory-y. It’s such a weird feeling, because I’m not following any of this. It’s just going from action sequence to action sequence, and I guess they’re introducing the characters and setting up the plot, but it’s taken thirty minutes and they just now got to William. They really could’ve used a briefing scene. And they could’ve had a scene where we saw that Duke was in a love triangle with Alex and Scarlett instead of just telling us. At the very least, they could’ve shortened this sequence so that all the characters got a brief spot and then we moved on. I’m just saying, half an hour and they’re not even done introducing all the characters yet!
And another thing. Why is Alex in a love triangle with Scarlett and Duke? Why not Snake Eyes? That’s how it is in the comics and on the cartoon. They gave him a voice and a face, so now he can “compete” with Duke. And he’s the second most prominent character anyway, he should be the second male lead.
Speaking of Snake Eyes being able to talk…
DUKE
(Yelling over the noise)
None of this gets to you, does it?
SNAKE EYES
(Shrugs)
When it’s your time… You know?
ALEX
(Shaking his head)
Goddam Buddhist.
Who could bear to keep him from expressing scintillating dialogue like that? And so far, we’ve established that Alex hates polygamists and Buddhists. How could this guy possibly be more unlikable?
Alex pauses and looks over at Duke, then grins.
ALEX
By the way… I’m going to ask Scarlet to marry me.
Duke looks like he just took the brunt end of a concussion grenade. Huh? I didn’t know grenades had ‘ends’, much less brunt ones. Alex shrugs and goes through the door low, firing. After a millisecond, Duke is all pro, and follows him in.
EXT. CUPOLA – DAY
Scarlet just stands there a moment dumbfounded. She is at a loss.Dumbfounded AND at a loss? Guess she read the script too.
SCARLET
Did you just ask me to marry you over a com-link in the middle of a fire fight?
[…]
ALEX
(Firing, yelling)
Romantic isn’t it…?
Yes, I think we all swooned a little when you did your best to distract your supposed best friend and lover while bad people were shooting at them. Oh, and you are still concerned about shit like the oligarchy and the CIA and cycles of violence and did you know 10% of the population consumes 90% of the world’s resources and they’re all Republicans? For fuck’s sake, man, it’s called Ritalin. Ask your doctor about it.
Oh, and I know the idea here is that all the characters are introduced in action (except for Flynt and William, I guess), but Heavy Duty isn’t even doing anything. He’s just loading a big gun that Hi-Tech is shooting remotely. That’s not very heroic.
Finally, forty minutes in and we’re done with the opening. So Scarlet punches Alex for proposing to her… physical violence, always the sign of a healthy relationship… and Christ, he’s known her for two years and he says he’s in love with her, you’d think he’d know that she’d be pissed off by this.
But now that they’ve captured Ayooby-dooby-doo, some UN guys led by slimy bureaucrat Ryan (wow, original. He’s Duke’s boss) show up to tell them that Ayoob’s being taken into protective custody. Well, that’s awkward. You’ve gotta imagine they’d shuffle their feet a little after killing two hundred mooks to get to him. Of course, they all deal with this like seasoned professionals.
DUKE
If those men don’t stop moving, you’ll be taking them back to Virginia in black plastic.
SCARLET
Are you of your goddam mind?
RYAN
Watch your mouth, Miss.
ALEX
Be careful, Bureaucrat. Real zinger there, Alex.
RYAN
You get no assurances. You do your job. That’s it. You’re a high tech mailman with an M-16 and delusions of grandeur.
DUKE
I said stop moving!
Duke’s men are pointing weapons at everyone.
DUKE
Either he gives up those weapons right here, right now. Or I will bury him on this mountain top.
ALEX
Duke, I was just talking shit earlier. This is not our call.
SCARLET
Let it go, sweety. Our job’s done.
ALEX
Did you just call him sweety?
Is everyone here twelve? And for some reason, Duke goes completely psycho. He shoots Ayoob and Ryan’s men with ”piezoelectric rounds”, and even blasts Alex, although really, that one was probably overdue. Then Scarlet gets him to stop (apparently she was the one who thought that Ayoob knew where the possibly imaginary nukes were, very convenient) with the old “do it for me” gag. So Duke stops being psycho as quickly as he started and lets Ayoob go. But someone hacks their machine gun and shoots down Ayoob’s plane. Not looking too good for Duke.
So a year later, Duke’s lecturing about the Tet Offensive to… some second graders. Well, I suppose it’s good that he’s not going jail time for disobeying direct orders, shooting his fellow soldiers, and murdering someone (accused). But couldn’t he get a job as a military contractor, or a consultant, or a policeman? How far down the ladder do you have to go to end up teaching second grade? That’s not really a skillset you see, performing assassinations and educating eight-year-olds. But hey, if they mouth off, he can always blast them with electric bullets.
But hey, remember Snake Eyes? Well, earlier he used experimental eye drops to give him enhanced vision, but he complained that they hurt his eyes. Now guess what?
Snake looks at him a moment, then removes his shades. He squints up at Duke. We can now see his eyes. His pupils have changed. They are thin, vertical black lines crossing his iris.
Yes. Snake Eyes, who can talk, has literal snake eyes. That is some stupid bullshit right there. I wanna waft in that. It takes effort to be that stupid.
So we’re left with two possibilities. First, his real name is Fred or something and now that he has snake eyes, people call him Snake Eyes. That must make a great nickname, being reminded of his painful deformity. What do they call the paraplegic Joe, Wheels?
Or, he’s always been called Snake Eyes, and by an insane coincidence, he got actual snake eyes. Maybe later Duke will marry a Duchess and become Duke Duke.
So Snake Eyes is visiting Duke to give him an invitation to Alex and Scarlett’s wedding. That seems a bit petty. I mean, Duke freaks and gets kicked out of the military, so she punishes him by marrying Alex? IDK, they’re both assholes, she should really just go on Match.com or something. Hell, she’d bound to find a better quality of man on Craigslist, even.
Am I wrong for thinking that all of these scenes would be more interesting if Snake Eyes couldn’t talk? If he just showed up and handed a wedding invitation to Duke and the scene was just Duke playing off him? That’d be really interesting. Maybe Snake Eyes could hold up a sign now and then, like “Stop being an asshole”. That sign would come in handy. Oh, least ominous phrase ever put to paper?
Cool Dude, the guy who fired the nuke, stands up and starts to walk the other way.
And hey, it’s fifty pages in, why not introduce some antagonists? The movie’s only half over.
His attention is clearly on a stunning blonde woman on the other side of the room. Her designer gown is backless, and we can see tattooed across her whole back a large stylized image of a cobra. This is the BARONESS ANASTASIA.
Admittedly, her character gets handled better here than in the real movie, but still. She’s blonde? And a huge cobra tattooed on her back, that’s great for a covert operative. Why not give her an eyepatch and a hook too, make her really noticeable. And a big T-shirt that says “I hate good guys.”
So Alex is there (he’s now heading a counterterrorist team in Europe, since GI Joe disbanded, although it was never called GI Joe, so the movie GI Joe isn’t actually about GI Joe, it’s about a bunch of fuck-ups, Jesus God make it stop). He’s interested in the Baroness (although she’s called Anastasia in the script) because she’s the mistress of the Angel, yet another arms dealer. He just happens to be at a party when he notices her. And Ryan is there too, so Alex ignores the arms dealer babe to insult his old boss. Asking what the hell his boss, a high-profile bureaucrat, is doing at a Foreign Ministry Ball. I don’t know, maybe he was invited?
So anyway, banter banter banter, then the Baroness gives Alex a card with “HOW MUCH $$$ DO YOU WANT THE ANGEL?” (sic. Very, very sic) written on it. You know, somehow I can’t picture the refined, elegant Baroness writing $$$. Why not draw a little stick figure of a dead Angel and a smiley face while you’re at it?
Then (oh for God’s sake) we cut to a bunch of UN people with names like “Ambassador,” “Powerful woman,” and “Dignified man” discussing someone who’s offering the identity of the Naja (no, not the Angel, totally different arms dealer) in exchange for one hundred million dollars (and, presumably, sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads) and a drug that will stop an outbreak of a disease in Africa. Wow, how intrig-yawn.
Then there’s a scene with Duke and Scarlett and they still love each other, but she also loves Alex. And none of the characters develop or reveal anything we don’t already know. But hey, more exposition! The Angel is working for the Naja, so that’s why they’re cutting the deal with yet another guy who can identify the Naja, and, umm… oh, hey, Ryan was at the same party as the Angel’s mistress. What an odd coincidence? Or, not, since, you know, Alex was there too. Does that mean Alex is working for the Angel?
But hold onto your butts, it’s about to get stupider.
POV: DRESSING ROOM
All we can see is Scarlet’s hand, splayed open on the ground. The wall is flecked with blood.
Alex RUNS to Scarlet’s side, picking her limp body up in his arms. Trying to do something. Anything.
But Duke already knows. It’s too late…
Oh, BARF.
Now, I’m not one to see sexism in everything. Even Gail Simone, who invented the term “women in the refrigerator,” wasn’t objecting to characters being fridged, just that it happened to women more than it did to men. That’s why they’re called supporting characters, because their relevance is how they affect the main characters. So if Superman’s story is best served by, say, Lucy Lane falling off a cliff, well, tough shit, the name of the comic is SUPERMAN, not LUCY LANE.
But this? This is fucking sexist. There’s only two women in this story. One of them’s martyred and the other is an evil bitch. More than that, Scarlett is the female lead. You think about heroines in GI Joe, Scarlett is what springs to mind. Killing her is like doing a Justice League movie where Wonder Woman dies so Batman and Superman are really pissed off at the bad guy. Or having a Star Wars movie where Leia dies so that Luke and Han are extra angry at Vader.
Moreover, it’s just unnecessary. You don’t need to kill off their girlfriend to get Duke and Alex involved in fighting Cobra. That’s their job!
Really now, let’s think about what Scarlett did in this story. She was lusted over by both Duke and Alex, and she got murdered to motivate them. You could save money on an actress and replace her with a rare Mickey Mantlo rookie card. Think about it. Both Duke and Alex really want that baseball card, but after Ayoob dies, Duke is demotivated and Alex is the one who bids the highest on eBay. Then, when it arrives in Alex’s mailbox, he discovers that it’s been cut apart to spell “Cobra rules!” Sure, the baseball card doesn’t have “supermodelesque looks,” but you could throw in a blonde in a bikini to walk around for a few minutes. She’d have as much impact on the story.
Of all the stories you could tell with GI Joe, why would you tell this one? There are already hundreds of stories with this exact same plot! We don’t really have that many badass female commandoes in cinema, so it would actually be more original to have Scarlett do literally anything else! You’re not doing anything new or interesting with the story, you’re just turning it from one cliché into another, more sexist cliché. Shame, shame, shame.
Need I say that we’re at the page sixty mark, halfway through the movie, and only now is the plot finally getting started?
So there’s a funeral and everybody’s sad and Snake Eyes says it was meant as a warning. I guess the bad guys have never seen an action movie before. “Let’s kill the wife and good friend of a highly-trained commando unit. What are they going to do about it? Hunt us down and kill us? The idea!”
Then we go to Cool Dude (ugh! Zartan! Dr. Mindbender! Firefly! Pick one of those!) kills the ambassador that we saw for, like, five seconds trying to pick up Ayoob and later talking about the deal to find out who the Naja was. And they’re framing some of the ambassador’s political enemies for it. It’s an hour in and we still have no idea who the bad guys are or what they’re trying to accomplish. Or how the good guys intend to fight them!
Okay, I’m getting bored. So the good guys go rogue (obviously) and kidnap Ryan, since Duke got a photograph of Scarlett meeting with Ryan and on the back was written “Ayoob is alive, Ryan is lying.” Because isn’t that what we all want to see in a GI Joe movie, political intrigue? Not bothering at all to think it might be a trick, the guys and Alex (who is coping with Scarlet’s death by drinking himself into a stupor… an action hero who gets really drunk, never seen that before) start beating Ryan up and insisting he tell them what’s going on. So Ryan (calling people dude, which is really inconsistent with how the character is about to “develop”) reveals that he was working with Scarlet, and that Ayoob didn’t die because he never got on the plane. In fact, he rushed back to New York to tell Ross that he loved him.
So Ryan says that Ayoob is the Angel, that there’s no Naja, and that Angel/Ayoob killed Scarlett. Excuse me while I reel from all the shocks. And Alex, who five minutes ago was going to kill Ryan to find out what he knew, suddenly says that Ryan teaming up with Duke is illegal and they have to go through the proper channels and get clearance and what’s your vector, Victor?
Duke points out that that worked out so well the last time, in so many words. And so on until it’s another dick-measuring contest over Scarlett. She’s dead, boys. Let it go. Alex also says that he knew Scarlett better than anyone. Yes, that was why she punched you in the face when you proposed to her. And then it gets really stupid.
ALEX
You want me to tell you? You’re the worst America has to offer. A bully that makes up his own rules as he goes, based on your own emotional ethics. Huh? You don’t think the law applies to you. You and men like you are the reason the US is hated by the rest of the world. You’re a blunt instrument. And Scarlet knew it. When I asked her to marry me, I wasn’t sure I had a chance. But you sealed your own fate with that stunt with Ayoob. You will never change and she knew it. Which’s why she ran to me. In the end, I’m, not even sure she still loved you--
I should hope not, seeing as she was marrying you. That’s right, folks, it’s a soap opera, it’s a subversive look at American foreign policy post-9/11… it’s not an action movie, but hey, why should there be action in a movie called GI Joe?
Now okay, maybe some of you are saying that a political action movie could work. After all, the Bourne films were okay, and so was Dark Knight. But this develops that plot in the most silly, irreverent, tasteless manner. It basically turns into a buddy cop, only instead of “one’s black, one’s white” or “one’s Chuck Norris, one’s a dog,” it’s one believes in torturing people and the other’s a pussy. Not that engaging.
The problem here is that an action movie is, and will always be, a fantasy, and this is trying to turn that fantasy into the more mature war drama, which is probably a bad idea when your movie is based on a toyline. We go to action movies to see people get their asses kicked. Even though in real life, we know that violence is a bad thing and it’d be better if we could talk through our differences, that’d be pretty lame in an action movie context. Does anyone really want to see James Bond stop the villains with trade sanctions and diplomatic condemnations?
So basically, this movie is asking us to root for the limp-dick police commissioner who’s telling the heroes to turn in their badges. It’s like watching Die Hard with Paul Gleason as the protagonist. He’s not the hero, in fact he’s getting in the way of stopping the bad guys and saving the day. It doesn’t help that this conflict is confused as all hell. We’ve got the justice versus vengeance thing, the security versus civil rights thing (technically), PLUS the old love triangle. There should be one central conflict, not ten. You wouldn’t want to see a movie where Batman has to fight the Joker, and conquer his drinking problem, and win Selina away from Superman, and come to grips with his latent racism, and learn to forgive his absentee father.
But anyway, Duke gets pissed off by that and punches Alex out, and they fight because they’re third-graders. Because while Scarlett may not have wanted them to kill her murderer (just once I’d like to see a fridged movie character leave a video will that says “Kill the motherfucker who got me”), she would definitely want them to flail at each other like cats in heat.
Fuck.
So Alex goes to meet with the Baroness about the Angel… because why would we want to see Duke’s roaring rampage of revenge when we can see people sitting down and dining? Of course, the Baroness gives him a verbal blowjob in public, since when has a villainess ever not used sex as a weapon? The Baroness says that she’s pretty much been whoring herself out to Ayoob, only now she wants to break up with him, so she needs Alex for protection. Yeah, right. A woman who’s a baroness in a GI Joe, that’s gonna end well. Well, actually, in the real movie…
Then Duke shows up and presses the Baroness for information, which she doesn’t have. So he leaves. That’s pretty much the entire scene, only without all the macho posturing and other bullshit. Thanks for advancing the plot, scene.
Then it turns out the ambassador’s aide… oh, God, we’re supposed to keep track of that guy? Sold him out to Cool Dude, although I don’t know why the bad guy would need inside information in order to break into someone’s house and kill them. So Duke and co show up at the restaurant he’s eating at and torture him into talking. Isn’t this the exact same scene we just left, just with someone named Bryce instead of with the Baroness? Alex shows up with his guys, and when Duke asks why he didn’t stop them from torturing Bryce, Alex says that hey, Duke got the information. So he’s a hypocrite and an asshole. Nice hero, script.
Duke escapes Alex, again, and they hijack the payment to Ayoob for his deal on the Naja’s identity. Uh, I think. I think Gosford Park had less characters to keep track of. Our heroes (antiheroes?) go to Tajikistan and find a “shitty third-world village” where everyone is poor and sick. Ayoob’s been hiding out here and he’s redeemed himself and now that his village is sick (which is what he needs the vaccine for) he’s at peace with being killed in exchange for their lives. Oh, how moving. This is a GI Joe movie, right?
Anyway, the script really pours it on with a ladle. Ayoob’s sick daughter is a polite little sweetheart, and his wife gets teary and kisses them on the cheeks, apparently not noticing that Duke’s holding a rifle and exchanging all this portentous dialogue with her husband. So Duke admits that he couldn’t have killed Scarlett… unless he’s manipulating them for his own ends like everyone else in the script, but okay, let’s roll with him being innocent… and apparently now he and Alex (who was waiting for them in the village) are on the same side again? Well, that was dramatic. This script is schizophrenic. It turns the little moments into these huge fistfights and shouting matches, then skates over the legitimately big moments.
Oh, and here comes the stupidest. The Baroness shows up (how did she get there? Hitch a ride?) and kisses Ayoob, who denies knowing her. Duke and Alex don’t find this at all suspicious, just chuckling over how he’s denying having a mistress because of his wife (although said wife didn’t notice the guy aiming a machine gun at her husband, so yeah). Now, given that the Baroness has said that Ayoob is a big bad arms dealer and she wants Alex’s protection just to break up with him, you’d think they’d notice the discrepancy between Couldn’t-Hurt-A-Fly-Ayoob and her Ayoob, being highly-trained counterterrorism experts and whatnot. Later, the Baroness actually kills Ayoob because no one bothered to question her. And who was the Angel, even? Just another name the Naja used?
What makes it even stupider is that there was no reason for her to risk blowing her cover. All she had to do was NOT walk up to Ayoob and kiss him and her chances for success would increase exponentially. You could say she’s just that cocky, but we haven’t seen that much of her character. In short, I have no idea what the point of this scene is, other than to establish that the Baroness is there.
Moving on. So Hi-Tech detects troop transports finding in and the Joes (should I even call them that?) grab weapons from Ayoob’s pissant armory. Oh, and he still has the nukes, so I guess he was partly responsible for blowing up Hong Kong. Still, his daughter is sick, so it’s okay! I bet a lot of people’s daughters got sick with radiation poisoning and died agonizing deaths, but screw ‘em, they’re off-screen!
Duke asks why Ayoob didn’t trade the nukes for the vaccine (this he picks to question?) and Ayoob says…
AYOOB
Despite what you think of me, I am not an evil man.
No, you’re just one of those nice guys who collects nuclear warheads. Okay, why not say to some legitimate government “I have ten nuclear warheads. Give me this vaccine or I’ll sell them to a rogue state”? Since he knows that trading the Naja’s identity would get him killed, right? Wait, hold on…
DUKE
So you decided to trade the identity of the Naja instead?
AYOOB
It seemed the most prudent. I had proof, insurance, all my financial dealings with the Naja’s organization over the years. It was in a Information Bank in Hong Kong. Heavily fortified. Impossible to break into. Unfortunately one of my partners chose that building as a testing ground for… and my proof evaporated.
Wait, what? WHAT? I thought he decided to trade the Naja’s identity a year after Hong Kong got nuked! Is he saying he doesn’t know who the Naja is? And what an unbelievable coincidence! This script isn’t just not making sense, it’s manufacturing nonsense.
So the Joes (?) fortify the village. And yeah, I guess Alex and Duke have mended fences. Glad we wasted time with that whole subplot about them not getting along, seeing as how it was entirely pointless. We could’ve just skipped all that and had Scarlett alive, going after the Naja/Angel/Ayoob/fuck-you with them. And on page 108, we finally get to an action scene. Let me just page back and see when the last fight was…
Holy shit, page 37! That’s seventy-one pages, OVER AN HOUR OF SCREENTIME (one page equals one minute), between the action in a GI JOE MOVIE. WHAT IN THE ACTUAL HELL!? They couldn’t come up with one scene involving armed conflict between then and now? You know, the bad guys are trying to do something bad and the good guys are trying to stop them? Or the good guys want to accomplish something and they have to get through the bad guys to do it?
You know what this script is? It’s a bullshit sandwich. There are these thin slices of action and in between them is a big steaming heap of flavorless intrigue, stupid conflict, sexism, and just plain stupidity. There’s no villain, there’s no conflict, there’s barely even a plot. I have no idea why anyone considered this story worth telling, even the writer! What else has this guy, Skip Woods, done?
X-Men Origins: Wolverine? Hitman? Swordfish? Oh fuck me, The A-Team? They let this guy write the A-Team? Oh, wait, they got some other people… the guys who did Wanted? Fuck me sidelong.
So fight scene. Honestly, this all depends on the director, so I’ll skip it. Cool Dude shows up, so I guess he’s involved in all this… somehow… (why did someone want to blow up Hong Kong again? If it was the Naja, detonating a nuclear warhead seems like the best possible way to get attention, not a good idea when you’re trying to pass yourself off as an urban legend. Or was it just to destroy Ayoob’s proof? Because again, see above about attention.). And Cool Dude (vomit) has the GI Joe Super-Duper Armor from earlier.
Something weird… Alex brought some men with him, but they don’t have names and seem to be there mainly to soak up bullets. In screenwriting terms, don’t they just clutter the action? You’d think it would just be the heroes against the bad guys, not them and some nameless extras.
So anyway, the Joes (…I guess?) blow up the oil wells outside the town, which is sure to be good for the sickly villagers. I don’t know, you had warning of an attack, couldn’t you have told them to make a run for it or gotten them all to somewhere fortified? Whatever. The oil hits the invisible mercenaries and turns them visible, so hurray for that. Ayoob gets taken hostage by the obviously lying woman who had no reason to be there… who could’ve seen that coming?... and she says that she led the mercenaries right to them. Which, given the reveal of the Naja coming up, makes no sense. He pretty much had to have Ayoob’s location, and could’ve sent guys anytime he wanted.
Anyway, the Baroness ‘fesses to killing Scarlett… great, the one catfight in this script and it’s offscreen… but Alex just doesn’t get it.
ANASTASIA
You almost have it. Think… How would I know what the last word she uttered from her bleeding lips.
First, there’s no way that sentence is grammatically correct. Second, geez, Alex, you’re not playing Hangman, she’s telling you she killed your fiancé! She was hoping to tell him in bed, in fact, but that would be far too interesting to happen in this screenplay. The Baroness continues using Ayoob as a human shield…
ANASTASIA
Careful. All that emotion could affect your aim. You might hit Ayoob. Could you live with that?
Oh no! I accidentally killed the arms dealer who helped nuke Hong Kong! MY LIFE IS A LIE!
So she kills Ayoob and gets away with it-—really, why not just shoot him and then leave? Why bother taking him hostage and give the Joes time to run over?-—by the way, great job there Alex—and Ayoob’s dying words are that “The Naja… Is… Here…” Of course, he could just say “Ryan… Is… The… Naja…” and save everyone a bunch of trouble, but hell, why not be dramatic as you shuffle off?
Yes, it’s Ryan. He shoots Hi Tech in the back and then LOOKS OUT THE WINDOW as he speechifies. So, naturally, Hi Tech gets up and tackles him. I’m pretty sure I could recreate the entire Evil Overlord List just from reading this script. Shoot him in the head, you idiot! Don’t shoot him once and then turn your back on him while you can see he’s breathing!
Oh, and the script refers to High Tech as “Hi.” Between him and Cool Dude, this script is actually physically paining me.
So they fall out the window, Ryan gets up and leaves while High Tech plays dead. Which he did literally one second ago. God, what is this guy, ADHD? SHOOT THE FUCKER IN HIS HEAD!
So Duke goes to confront Ryan, who says that the GI Joes have been doing his dirty work for years… when did this become Alias? So four of Ryan’s men take Duke hostage. Good hustle, Duke.
RYAN
You must admit it was pretty slick.
DUKE
Why?
RYAN
Is this where I spill my guts and tell you everything, just before you kill me and my four heavily armed mercenaries?
Oh, so you’re not going to talk to him, you’re just going to shoot him then?
RYAN
Because you’re good. I knew you would find him. And I needed someone to blame it all on.
JESUS CHRIST!
Okay, so Ryan needed Duke as a scapegoat for Ayoob’s death, since how else could you explain an arms dealer dying in Africa? Here’s a thought, just kill Ayoob and say “oh, no, one of the ten million crazy fuckers with guns must’ve gotten him.” It’s Africa. Not exactly a low crime rate there.
But anyway, Ryan’s the villain… yes, our action movie has a bad guy, on the hundred and fifteenth page… and may I just say, no, not Ryan, how could you? We trusted you! Wait, no, you were the bureaucratic asshole everyone already disliked. So much emotional heft there. BUT ANYWAY, why is he doing all this?
I’m back at Langley before the weekend. Doing my job. Instigating my own little wars. Perfect.
WHY!? If your motivation is doing unscrupulous shit to protect America, you already have a black ops team going around killing bad guys. WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED? Bigger bullets? Is he going to use the nukes to blow up a rogue state? What is this guy’s plan? What are the good guys trying to stop him from doing? It seems like his big evil scheme is just to save his own skin.
So the mercenaries spring a trap while trying to find the nukes, which Duke hid… apparently he was onto Ryan, so I’m sure High Tech and the bullet in his gut appreciate the warning. Duke gets away.
Ryan is fucked up by the blast. The Baroness and Cool Dude help him back to the plane. Snake Eyes attacks, but apparently Cool Dude is a ninja, because he pulls out a sword and fights him. REALISM! Also, is there now any reason at all to not name him Storm Shadow? Apparently, he’s not Cobra Commander or anything, since that’s Ryan. Why not just make up a name, like Mr. Smith or something? Anything would be better than Cool Dude.
So Snake Eyes gets stabbed in the throat as he kills Cool Dude, severing his vocal cords, so he’s finally mute. Really, that should’ve happened in the opening. It’s like an X-Men movie where Cyclops only has to wear a visor at the end, and the rest of the movie he’s just looking around at everything like a motherfucker.
Oh, and Ryan and the Baroness get away. So the revenge movie ends in nobody getting any revenge. Zen. This is Screenwriting 101 here. If you’re going to sacrifice the female lead for a set-up, it should have a pay-off. There should be a big emotional, dramatic confrontation! But no, Duke and Alex just trade some banter with Ryan and the Baroness, then they part ways. It’s as unsatisfying as a chocolate-covered turd.
Even the characters comment on how weak this ending is (because when you go to see a GI Joe, it’s for a low-key, understated climax).
DUKE
So, Ayoob’s dead. The Baroness got away. Along with a hundred million dollars and the most notorious arms dealer on the planet, who it turns out I’ve been working for all along. And we destroyed an entire village in the process. Doesn’t sound so good…
Yeah, you suck pretty hard.
ALEX
True. But… we did get the nukes back. Yes, you stopped the bad guys from using them to… sell? And we uncovered the identity of the Naja, effectively putting him out of business. Yes, I’m sure everyone will believe the crazed vigilantes over the senior CIA agent. And that he won’t be able to sell weapons now that you know his name. Not to mention Ryan will be eating out of a straw for a very long time. I’m sorry, is it you or Duke that’s the violent brute again? And we saved all these villagers. They are being inoculated right now. That was more Ayoob than you. Really, you did more to fuck up his plan than anything else. And get him killed. I dunno, kinda seems like a win to me. If this is the intelligence community, no wonder the underwear bomber got through.
So they decide to get the GI Joes back together, even though they don’t call them that so what’s the point? And hey, all that conflict over civil rights and security? Why, just an excuse for banter, my good man!
ALEX
But…! We do it my way. No cowboy stuff.
We begin to CRANE UP.
DUKE
Of course.
ALEX
I’m serious, Duke. No bullshit. No torturing suspects, no breaking international law, no cutting side deals with the CIA, no killing people to right your own sense of morality--
Yes, God forbid soldiers KILL PEOPLE. I mean, what would the world come to? Then they banter about who’s tougher than who because God hates me.
Meanwhile, in an airport, the Baroness has dyed her hair black and wears horn-rimmed glasses. Because why not wait until the last fucking page of your script to have your characters actually bear a resemblance to the characters?
And as if the swordfight in a third-world warzone wasn’t an awkward enough fusion of the GI Joe mythos with boring Bourne Identity poser-ness, there’s Ryan’s new look.
Ryan has a white Teflon and titanium jointed mask screwed into his face. Not a mask really, but designed to set the bones in his crushed face.
Look, either go all the way and make a comic book movie, or do your own thing, but stop with this halfway bullshit. It’s just stupid. Speaking of stupid…
ANASTASIA
Now what…?
RYAN
I don’t know. I was kind of thinking world domination.
Since when is he motivated to do that? How does one go from arms dealer to dictator? And what was up with him having Cool Dude killing people? Is there one aspect of this character that makes any sense?
So they get away, presumably to fight in a sequel where the characters actually look and act like the real characters.
Basically, what this script does is take the GI Joe franchise and try to turn it into The Bourne Identity. That is to say, the same generic action/adventure crap that you can get from any movie, but with the GI Joe name slapped on it to appeal to some sick sense of nostalgia. If they really thought the story was that strong, why not strip away all the (really minor) GI Joe elements entirely and do something original, so the audience could go in without preconceptions? Didn’t they think the audience would wonder where Storm Shadow and Cobra Commander and all the other GI Joe stuff they remember were? Didn’t they think people would ask “hey, what does this have to do with GI Joe?” It’s not even a good Bourne Identity rip-off.
Look, a GI Joe shouldn’t be that hard. Everyone likes to see the US military blowing shit up, and since the enemy is COBRA, we don’t have to put up with any white liberal guilt. Just have COBRA doing something nefarious and GI Joe trying to stop them. That’s all we need, that’s all the finished film was, and that’s why it worked. This is too smart by half, thinks it’s a lot smarter than it is, and for fuck’s sake, Snake Eyes had snake eyes. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go into mourning for the A-Team movie. I thought that was going to be so boss when they cast Bradley Cooper as Face…
