dMYD DVD
Starring Some Pretty Unlikely Actors
M
Remember when you’d smash your Ninja Turtle figures into the sinkhole outside just to get away from Grandma’s spittle? Or throw your Transformers as high as you could and pretend to be surprised when they broke into £9.99 worth of plastic arm-bits on the concrete? Or when you put out cigarettes on that Furby from the loft? Stephen Sommers doesn’t; he’s a relatively soulless Hollywood auto-directing device who was raised by CGI wolves, an experience that came in handy with his previous incredathonVan Helsing, the film that tried to throw every piece of 1800s literature together to make a credible modern action movie. It failed, but it failed spectacularly.
G.I Joe tries the same thing, but with toys and the past decade of comic book movies. Suck a lungful: there’s ninjas, Iron-Men, explosions, Doctor Who, guns, green explosions, black guys whose cracks are wise, tits, falling Eiffel Towers, underwater bases, huge stoic black guys, impractically clothed gurls, blue explosions, Ray Park, fist-punching and more product-placement than the Superbowl crossbred with Waynes World. Cramming in this much relentless box-ticking doesn’t leave time for dialogue, characters or anything approaching a story, but at its best the film does approach the giddy joy of seeing a ten year old boy let loose with $175 million dollars and a bizarrely inept CGI studio.
Unfortunately that personal best only lasts for twenty minutes, the bit in Paris in the middle where everything plays out like an unironic stage-school production of Team America. The whole sequence is an unpretentious run-fun-gun-athon, two divs in supersuits desperately chasing a van full of baddies and causing endless collateral damage to the city that hillbillies whoop to hate, culminating in lots of glass-smashing, explosions and explosions. It’s great. Everything else is too damn fast. Sommers’The Mummy may have been a shameless Indy knock off but at least it had the luxury of being filmed in 1998, when actors were given time to say their lines or even attempt characterisation. Van Helsing exists on the cut-off point around 2004, when studios decided they had to kick the shit out of videogames by becoming them, but even that mess had time for a quick Lion King homage and Richard Roxburgh screaming about chess and coins.
There’s nothing here except a big finger to the source plastic. Ten years ago it would have been charming and kitsch to see Christopher Eccleston, Sienna Miller and Jo Jo Gordo Levitt spout lines about action figures and planes and nnnneeeeeooow, but nowadays there’s no time to give them anything funny to say before the next burst of light and sound. Still, it’s pretty fucking nuts at times, it occasionally brings to mindthis, and you may as well see it instead of the amazingly cookie-cuttery looking ‘grittier’ Rock-hard reboot this year. Who’s the market for it? And why did Dennis Quaid sign on for two sequels without reading the script when knowing is half the battle?
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