Review: GI Joe

While walking out of the theater after watching GI Joe this past Friday, I went onto Facebook on my Blackberry and posted this: "GI Joe was without a doubt the best movie of the year."

What did I learn from doing this? I need to improve the sarcastic tone in my Facebook status updates.

To be fair, GI Joe was pretty much what I expected it to be: a fairly mindless action movie with little plot, a poor-bordering-on-REALLY-poor script, overly patriotic themes, lots of overly dramatic macho speeches, and actors who were chosen for their roles mainly based on how hot they were. Also, this movie had Marlon Freaking Wayans in it. That screams volumes about your movie's credibility when he's one of the guys that's supposed to carry the movie.

Anyway, speaking as someone with half a brain, this movie was pretty terrible. Speaking as someone who often times doesn't use half a brain, I actually don't really regret watching it. So with that in mind, there are three fundamental questions about GI Joe that should be asked:

Was it entertaining? Yes, on many levels it was. Thanks in large part to the over the top, no-way-in-hell-will-this-ever-be-possible technology, the characters are able to do ridiculous things that result in some decently fun-to-watch action sequences. But it was also entertaining in terms of how stupid it was at times. And I don't just mean the action; I'm talking about some of the lines and the way the movie flowed in general. Just stupid.

Was it cool? When I say cool, I mean cool in terms of the way that Star Wars was cool with its incredible graphics and CGI computer craziness that made you watch in amazement. So now that we have the definition, GI Joe was far from cool. In fact, GI Joe would probably be the chess club captain who gets his lunch money stolen every day at school. I swear, if I knew how to work my Mac better, I could probably create better 3-D graphics than some of the GI Joe scenes. I don't know what the allotted budget for this movie was, but I'm sure it was huge. Clearly they didn't invest that money into the graphics department (or into the script writing department).

And finally... was it good? Absolutely not. Keep in mind, I didn't expect that it would be. I think it would have been a bigger surprise to me if the movie had actually turned out to be halfway decent. And this is the thing to keep in mind when watching GI Joe: keep your expectations low, and you'll leave feeling okay about the movie... and about yourself for having watched the movie.

Now you know! And knowing is half the battle.