{"id":6293,"date":"2009-08-10T00:28:19","date_gmt":"2009-08-09T23:28:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/?p=6293"},"modified":"2009-08-11T01:07:38","modified_gmt":"2009-08-11T00:07:38","slug":"g-i-joe-world-police","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/2009\/08\/10\/g-i-joe-world-police\/","title":{"rendered":"G.I. Joe: World Police"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"GI<\/p>\n

Back in 2004 Paramount released Team America: World Police<\/a>, a comedy in which a special forces unit goes around the world trying to stop terrorist super villains.<\/p>\n

A satire on the overblown stupidity of Bush-era foreign policy<\/a> and Hollywood action films, it used plastic marionettes<\/a> instead of actors and deliberately fake sets.<\/p>\n

This year with G.I. Joe<\/strong><\/a>, Paramount have essentially made the same movie, only the actors are real (despite being based on toys<\/a>) and the CGI work is only marginally more convincing than the deliberately naff sets used by Matt Stone<\/a> and Trey Parker<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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This is a summer blockbuster that will go down as something of a joke within the film industry as it is both sloppy and ludicrously over the top.<\/p>\n

After the massive success<\/a> of Transformers<\/a>, producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura<\/a> and Paramount probably saw this as a logical successor, it being another toy franchise that had been adapted into an animated series.<\/p>\n

The creative people involved in bringing it to the screen – principally the studio, director Stephen Sommers<\/a> and screenwriters Stuart Beattie<\/a>, David Elliot and Paul Lovett – have somehow created a weird hybrid of action movie and cartoon.<\/p>\n

This was never going to be a project that would get highbrow movie lovers excited but there was perhaps a decent action film to be made along the lines of X-Men<\/a> or Mission: Impossible<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But something has gone badly wrong in bringing this material to the screen: the characters are campy stereotypes, the editing is whizz-bang and the dialogue is crammed with exposition to the point of self-parody.<\/p>\n

At times it seems like they are actually trying to duplicate the style of the animated series.<\/p>\n

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Although hardly meant to be realistic, one sequence demonstrates the nonsensical nature of how it was put together.<\/p>\n

Much of Paris is destroyed as Joes pursue evil Cobra agents through Paris, but it is only after several streets and<\/em> the Eiffel Tower are destroyed that any police show up.<\/p>\n

Cut to the next scene in the White House where the US President is told: “The French are very upset”. To which he gives the immortal reply “of course<\/em> they are upset!”.<\/p>\n

Was this stuff added late on for laughs, so in years to come those involved could claim it was all a joke?<\/p>\n

More puzzling is the sheer mediocrity of the elements that you might expect a film of this budget to get right.<\/p>\n

The CGI used for various desert and underwater locations is well below par by modern Hollywood standards.<\/p>\n

Stephen Sommers found success directing The Mummy<\/a> films in 1999 and 2001 (which were OK but forgettable Indiana Jones<\/a> rip-offs) but then proceeded to make Van Helsing<\/a> (2004), which was one of the worst mainstream films of the decade.<\/p>\n

He’s back now with this clunker, a film so bad that Paramount decided not to screen it for critics<\/a> other than web-based ones they felt might give it some love.<\/p>\n

They were even afraid to give it a big push at the geek temple of Comic-Con<\/a>.<\/p>\n

However, despite all its flaws it has just opened to a big opening weekend<\/a> in the US and will earn a fair amount worldwide.<\/p>\n

People will no doubt wring their hands at how a film this bad will make serious money and spawn sequels.<\/p>\n

But there is a tradition of expensive bad films filled with meaningless set-pieces, the most notable being the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, a series that played more like an LSD-inspired fairground ride rather than an actual movie.<\/p>\n

G.I. Joe will be less successful but in years to come might be known as the first post-satire blockbuster, a film which was parodied five years before it actually got made.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

G.I. Joe is actually the live version of Team America: World Police – a post-satire blockbuster.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1072],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6293"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6293\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}