I guess it was foolhardy of me to expect anything out of Snake Eyes, given the horrible track record of the franchise up to this point. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was Hasbro’s first attempt at bringing the titular character to the big screen and almost sunk Channing Tatum’s career in the process. Not to mention it contains one of the worst costume decisions in modern cinema by putting lips on Snake Eyes, whose defining trait is that he doesn’t speak.
G.I. Joe: Retaliation was the first time Hollywood tried inserting The Rock into a sequel to revive a franchise, but unlike Fast Five, even Johnson’s natural charisma couldn’t save an identical (to the first movie) world-ending plot and an assortment of characters that have about as much onscreen personality as the G.I. Joe action figures that they are based on. Now we have Snake Eyes, a prequel to a character who doesn’t speak, and whose backstory we have already seen in the previous two installments with hilarious flashbacks that play like a kung-fu parody in Rise of Cobra and awful RZA line readings in Retaliation. So it can only get better from here, right? Well, not quite. Not at all actually.
Anybody lose a Kohl’s display mannequin?
Snake Eyes drops the end of the world stakes of the first two, but then replaces it with paper thin characters that switch sides more times in one movie more than characters do in all of the Fast and Furious franchise. It takes Inigo Montoya’s “you killed my father, prepare to die” speech from Princess Bride and creates an entire movie around it when we have no relationship to the father or Snake Eyes in the first place and the movie doesn’t give us a reason to in all of its 2 hour (why can’t any modern blockbuster be under 2 hours?)
Henry Golding has certainly made a name for himself with his charming leading man roles in movies like Crazy, Rich, Asians, and Last Christmas, but an action star he is not. It was a tall task to bring any sort of personality to a character who doesn’t have any, but he might as well have not spoken at all. There’s a cartoonish McGuffin, three tests he must go through, and relationships that are just constructions of the plot and it all amounts to a big load of nothing. Samara Weaving, who was having a star turn as of late, is completely wasted, as is Andrew Koji and Iko Uwais who are both stuntmen who look like they know that this is a waste of their time. Once three giant snakes and a fire rock that gave you the power to blow stuff up with your mind I could barely comprehend what was going on or what kind of movie this wanted to be, but I knew that it was just as soulless as the previous two G.I. Joe entries.
Sure, there is a scene where a bunch of swords break through every window of an SUV trapping two passengers in between the blades and there is a freeway chase that has some decent moments, but the shaky action is nothing to write home about especially since the previous two movies spent hundreds of millions of dollars on over-the-top visual effects and action set pieces to keep up with the annual Transformers films of the time.
Even so, the movie is already being called a flop and one must wonder how many more times Hasbro will try and draw from this empty well. There were “revelations” at the end that were so obvious that I guessed them in the opening minutes in the film and teases to future movies that I can’t see anyone being excited for. These cartoon characters were never meant to lead two-hour movies and it is becoming painfully obvious why. In a summer of bad action blockbusters like Mortal Kombat and Black Widow, none made me want to walk out of the theater more than Snake Eyes did.
Final Rating:
‘Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins’ is now available on Digital and Blu-Ray.
Rated PG-13.
(Photo: Paramount)
