Superhero Media: G.I. Joe - The Rise of Cobra

I was born in 1986, so GI Joe was never a major thing for me, about all I really know comes from Robot Chicken, references in The Venture Bros and that episode of The Toys That Made Us. What I do know about the franchise makes it seem like there's a lot of potential for storytelling, with Cobra originating as domestic terrorists, the Joes being drawn from different countries and military branches and the whole clandestine international peacekeeping task-force that's always been done better in Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD comics. The film starts in pre-revolutionary France where a Scottish arms smuggler has a Dumas-esque iron mask welded to his face. In the modern day, a top-secret military convoy transporting bleeding-edge nano-tech missiles is ambushed by Cobra forces. Except that they're not Cobra. Yeah, Cobra doesn't actually appear in this film as an entity until the final minutes, the Joes spend most of the film fighting a rogue weapons dealer and his company "Mars". 

Again, I don't really know a lot about GI Joe, but isn't doing a film without Cobra kind of like doing SHIELD without Hydra? A lot of the iconic characters are there, like Storm Shadow, The Baroness and Zartan, but they're working for Mars and Christopher Eccleston, who, yes, becomes Destro at the end of the film, but isn't doing that right now. Duke and Ripcord are recruited into the Joes, team up with Scarlet, Snake Eyes and Heavy Duty and chase the Baroness around the globe, who turns out to have been Duke's ex-fiance. Even as someone who doesn't have a lot of interest in or emotional connection to GI Joe, I found the Baroness of The Rise of Cobra to be a grating character, not such much in performance, but in execution. From what I know, the Baroness is a classic femme-fatale, alluring but diabolical and calculating, dedicated to the cause but canny enough to keep herself alive at the expense of others. In The Rise of Cobra, the Baroness has been brainwashed into being Mars' seductress for a scientist they'll need for one scene and breaks free when she remembers how much she loves Duke.

I don't need to be a fan to know crummy storytelling when I see it. If a character is already one of the most popular in the franchise, they typically don't need a great deal of tweaking when being shifted to a new medium. The changes to the Baroness are even more stark when considered in contrast to Snake Eyes, who, aside from a costume update, remains essentially the same and is somehow the most compelling character in the film. As I mentioned above, there are some great ideas and concepts in the GI Joe franchise, and I'd like to see what could be done with it in better hands. This really isn't a film that I can recommend for anything, except maybe the Snake Eyes/Storm Shadow fight (which you can see on YouTube) and putting Rachel Nichols in black leather for the entire film (which you can see on Google). The design is pretty slick though, and is easily a route that any SHIELD film could have gone down before Marvel Studios took over.