PG-13, 1h 58m

Critics: C-

Miles: C+

Brooklynne: C

Brooklynne and I watched G.I. Joe last night. Brooklynne saw it while she was in Utah, so it was nothing new to her, but I was seeing it for the first time. All in all, it was a fine summer flick, which was entertaining, especially if you checked your expectations at the door, but it was only a mediocre adaptation from the cartoons that I grew up with and the potential for a really good action movie was mostly wasted.

I guess most of you would say, "what did you expect from a movie whose main purpose is to boost toy sales?" but I'm going to share my two main gripes anyway. First, the action and special effects were really cartoonish. That's not my issue. That would have been fine, and the movie could have been great by hailing back to its cartoon roots. But the cartoony action made the movie seem like a kid movie, which clashed with the ramped up violence compared to the animated series. In the original series, people didn't die (or very rarely at least). Things blew up and the bad guys ran away in a rain of bullets, but people's heads did not explode, people weren't run through with knives and stuff, and there wasn't an explicit disregard for human life. My suggestion to filmmakers is to go one way or the other. A realistic, violent, shoot 'em up would have been great for an adult audience, and a cartoonish, mild action movie for younger kids would have been fun. But a mix of the two seems both uncomfortably violent for the young kids it seems designed to appeal to, and annoyingly lame excuse for a more mature action movie.

Secondly (and perhaps predictably), the writers murdered the characters of the original. While Sienna Miller plays a great Baroness, her relationship with Duke is an affront to boys who grew up loving the series. Everyone knows that the Baroness is Destro's woman. Destro, on the other hand, comes off as weak character and incapable of being a convincing partner for the Baroness, which ruins any potential future for those characters in the inevitable sequels.

Duke's character was alright, as well as Ripcord, although the banter between Ripcord and Scarlet was lacking something. The pacing was good--you never felt like the story was bogged down in details. And the Zartan character did lend the audience something to be curious about in the next installment.

So there you have it... enjoyable movie, but far far from great, and not a movie that will satisfy your old G.I. Joe nostalgia. Did anyone else see it?  Thoughts?