Tone is a difficult thing to get right. In a lot of ways it's the crux of everything that's put to page or screen. For instance, you cannot make a slapstick comedy about the Holocaust (Lord knows I've tried) and at the same time you can't treat something like...oh I don't know 'Transformers' with po-faced seriousness.
GI JOE sets up a tone of its own. Almost everyone involved (With one glaring exception which we'll get to later) is in on the joke. It's so gloriously stupid that it's hard not to give it a good review just for trying. There's nothing in the film that suggests it has a grounding in the real world. Instead it seems to take place in a world that looks like our own, but it's a world where 'Team America: World Police' was a documentary and not a comedy.
Usually this is the point in a review where I would explain the plot, but I don't think it would do any good. It basically involves Christopher Eccleston's evil Scottish Weapons designer (Having a lot more fun here than he did in 'Gone in 60 seconds') stealing his own world destroying weapons and some other plot points that I won't mention. There to stop his nefarious deeds is the crack team of GI JOE, made up of the 'best of the best' as these things usually are. It also speaks to my ignorance of 80's Hasbro toys that I thought GI JOE was actually a person.
GI JOE is a world in which people's names actually appear to be Snake Eyes, Stormshadow and Ripcord rather than nicknames they've somehow obtained through some childhood hijinx. It's a film that begins in 1641 for no good reason, other than to watch a man have a red hot mask welded to his face. It's also a film in which characters suffer some sort of flashback syndrome, in some cases they flashback in the middle of a fight scene; often to another fight scene.
Stephen Sommers made his name with 'The Mummy' films (Though he was absent for part 3, perhaps wisely). But for me his magnum opus will always be 'Deep Rising', a sadly underseen treat that plays up to its B-Movie roots. GI JOE comes close to replicating the same thing. It's literally a Cartoon that's come to life, and the cast know it. They know you can't even begin to approach this type of material seriously, unlike the earlier 'Transformers 2'. The dialogue is often the on the nose nonsense you find in Saturday morning cartoons, and Dennis Quaid in particular seems to have fun delivering it.
The rest of the cast follow suit. That is except Channing Tatum, in the lead role, and sadly for us the actor is a complete charisma vacuum. He delivers every line as if he's trying to convince himself that he memorised the script, like a child and his timetables. Even the usually unbearable Marlon Wayans is a lot more enjoyable, and when that's the case you know you're in trouble as an actor. Things get worse when Brendan Fraser shows up in a very brief cameo and only reminds you how much better he is for this type of film. Sienna Miller proves herself to have a career in villainy (And as a brunette) and Rachel Nichols just outright looks gorgeous (Speaking to my long dormant secret love for redheads).
I'm tempted to see the film a second time. I need to see it again just to be sure that a characters name is actually "Dr Mindbender" and not something I mis heard. I need to see Joseph Gordon Levit laugh maniacally like any true Cartoon villain. And I want to see Paris getting partially destroyed, lord knows they deserve it.
