[C]GI Joe: The Rise of the Franchise

Tonight I've just seen GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, which I imagine is the first in a series of films that are bound to end up as straight-to-DVD fodder by about GI Joe 5.

I did quite enjoy it. It was glorious dross. The script was negligible. Character development was minimal (hey, they're just action figures). It had quite a cool gizmo premise (nano-mites that can munch their way through a city) and plenty of ludicrous techware (accelerator suits, caseless gatling guns you wear on your arm, micro-submarines, plasma energy weapons, hover dropships, and so on). Plus car chases, explosions, the destruction of Paris. All good stuff. Sienna Miller and Rachel Nichols were gorgeous to watch scrapping it out too. Definitely a boy's movie.

One thing that let it down was the slightly shoddy CGI, particularly in the undersea battles. There were a few occasions when the CGI was painfully obvious, which is a bit of a disaster in an effects-driven film. But it was fun and entertaining and just about the right length, which is more than can be said for the half-hour too long Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, which just didn't really do it for me.

I wouldn't say GI Joe was a better film than Transformers 2, because that would imply Gi Joe was a good film, but I felt I enjoyed it more. And ultimately that's the acid test of this kind of noisy nonsense.

Jongudmund's ratings
GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra - 6.5/10 Worth seeing once.
Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen - 6/10 Lacked the (all)spark that made the first one so great.