Splendid Feast – “G.I.Joe: The Rise of Cobra”

“G.I.Joe” was the only “boys’ cartoon” I watched during my childhood. Now I could even hardly remember the names in it, don’t mention the stories. But the theme song still rings the bell – “G.I.Joe, G.I.Joe, …”. So I headed to the cinema as soon as I found this “beginning” movie was on.

Basically there are two “winning tricks” to make a real-life movie out of a classic comic book / cartoon: You can either make a much “deeper” (and most of the time, much darker too) story to attract those ppl that never watched the original ones, or just use tens of millions of dollars to “reproduce” those classic costumes, scenes and monsters so that the loyal fans will finally pay the bill. This “G.I.Joe” movie chose the second one, by piling up incredibly advanced weapons, incredibly CG effects and incredibly hot hulks and chicks. Don’t expect anything “abstract” or “reasonable” here – what you should expect is just a splendid feast for your eyes.

Channing Tatum is not good enough for my Duke, but anyway he is not doing much “solo” here (Marlon Wayans a.k.a. Ripcord definitely stole a lot of scenes from him), so I’ll just let it be. Sienna Miller showed me nothing but her sexy curves, and the most unforgivable thing is that she even could not make any chemistry with the Korean heart-throb Lee Byung Hun! On the contrary, Lee Byung Hun did whatever he could to make the impression, including showing his six-packs without any reason in his last scene (OK, I admit, there is one reason for that, the box office…).

To me, he did his Hollywood debut much better than his fellow Daniel Henney. Other baddies are just normal, no difference from other baddies in other movies. The only one that “popped up” is Arnold Vosloo (as Zartan, whom I believe that will have some bigger shares in the next sequel), because another “un-credited” role in this movie is Brandon Fraser (as a Joe trainer). That reminds me the “Mummies” series… Another name to take note is the young Storm Shadow (the adult role by Lee Byung Hun), Brandon Soo Hoo. This little boy is only 14 yrs old, with black belt in Taekwondo, fluent in English, Mandarin and Cantonese, and practicing Wing Tsun now. Could he become the next Bruce Lee?

Notable scenes of this movie:
1. The car racing in the streets of Paris. Although we all know that was not true, just use your imagination pls…
2. The fall of Eiffel Tower. You guys French must got some issue with Hollywood – There are quite several movies recently took this big guy down.
3. The attack of Joe’s under-water troops against the secret base of MARS. That reminds me the Pacific War era – the legendary Hornet and Yamato…

Scenes that could have been better:
1. The first confront between Baroness and Duke. Maybe they wanted to make Joe’s look more powerful, by portraying a group of useless commandos…
2. Fights between Baroness and Scarlett. Come on, two hot chicks are fighting! Can you show us sth hotter?
3. Fights between Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes. Again, we expect more skillful sword-plays. Even the laser swords in Star Wars 30 yrs ago did a better job.

And I can promise you that there is definitely gonna be a sequel. But I really got worried for the writers and director of this coming sequel – how would you make the story when you got Zartan in the office of xxx…

Those Weird Guys (2) – The Good, The Bad, The Weird

Kim Ji-woon was previously considered as a horror movie director. So when he did A Bittersweet Life in a gangster style story-telling, ppl got a fresh eye on him. Then here comes this The Good, The Bad, The Weird, a tribute to those 50’s cowboy masterpieces.

The story was set to be happened in 1930’s Manchuria (the north-eastern part of China), a land of gangsters, thieves, Japanese, Independent Korean Movement, and, of course, local Chinese. When a mystic treasure map was leaked to the “market”, everyone wanna grab a piece of it. The fighting started from gun shooting in the street, all the way to heavy machine guns and canons shouting after horses and motorcycles on the Manchurian Plains. Really cowboy, right? But the movie also got some Asian style of humors, like how a whole group of Japanese cavalry men were shot down by a dead man behind a heavy machine gun. Some of the tricks can be even traced back to my long-time favorite French movie La Grande Vadrouille.

“The Weird” was actually a train robber, who happened to take the map in a “routine job”. Instantly he became the target of various gangster and military groups. On the run he appeared to be a funny guy yet with excellent shooting skills, which, at the very end, you would find out why. Song Kang-ho is a regular to international movie awards and has impressed the world with films like Joint Security Area (a.k.a. JSA), The President’s Barber, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, The Host and Secret Sunshine. He is specialized in those grass-root roles that playing big in certain circumstances. This time definitely he did a good job in his regular shoes.

“The Bad” was a cold-blood killer, who killed his own boss and grabbed the leadership of the whole gang. During the hunting for the map, he showed no mercy to anybody or anything. Lee Byung-hun is one of the “heavenly kings” in Korean TV dramas, who tried to find a bigger fame on the bigger screens. Although he got a Captain-Jack-Sparrow-like eye makeup, he didn’t seem to have the same ability as Johnny Depp to take such a complicated role.

“The Good” was a bounty hunter, who was paid by the Independent Korean Movement to find the map, and on the way he also wanna arrest The Bad and The Weird for the bounty. Pity for Jung Woo-sung is that he got only one scene to show some acting skills. In most of the time he could be replaced by any stuntman. Not a successful try for this romantic topic regular to step out of the comfort zone.

The gun shooting scenes are essential for cowboy movies, as well as this one. But some scenes just seem too incredible, like Jung blasted a guy’s head with a shot gun in one hand while doing some Tarzan swift with the other hand. But the final “triangle dual” scene was quite classic.
As a Chinese, I really dislike the dialogues in Chinese in this movie (and in most Hollywood movies and U.S. TV): I could not even understand them! On the contrary, they did quite a good job in those lines in Japanese. So can I say that the 50 yrs’ occupation by Japanese did teach them sth.?