Paramount spent $175 million to put G.I. Joe on the big screen in 2009, and the result is a film that never quite decides what it wants to be. Part military thriller, part toy commercial, part family drama about a lost brother, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra tries to carry all of it at once and drops most of it on the floor. The published critical score sits at 3.2 out of 10, and that number is fair. This is a loud, expensive, frequently incoherent movie that mistakes movement for momentum and casting for character.
Trailer, via YouTube Movies.
A Toy Line Becomes a Franchise
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is the first installment in the G.I. Joe film series, based on characters from Hasbro’s G.I. Joe toy line. Stephen Sommers directed from a screenplay by Stuart Beattie, David Elliot, and Paul Lovett, with story by Michael B. Gordon and Stephen Sommers. The film runs 118 minutes. It premiered at Andrews Air Force Base on July 31, 2009, and Paramount Pictures released it in the United States on August 7, following an extensive marketing campaign focused on the Mid-American public.
The film drew mostly negative reviews from critics. It grossed $302.5 million worldwide against a $175 million budget — enough to justify a sequel, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, in 2013. Money is not the same thing as quality, and here the gap between the two is wide.
Development on the first film began in 2003. When the United States launched the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Hasbro suggested adapting Transformers instead. Leaked script drafts drew criticism from fans, so Larry Hama, who wrote the comic book series G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, was hired as creative consultant and rewrites followed. Filming took place in Downey, California and at Prague’s Barrandov Studios. Six companies handled the visual effects, with Digital Domain as the main vendor.
Duke, Ripcord, and the Ambush
The story follows two American soldiers, Duke and Ripcord, who join the G.I. Joe Team after being attacked by Military Armaments Research Syndicate troops. Channing Tatum plays Duke. Marlon Wayans plays Ripcord.
Weapons master James McCullen, played by Christopher Eccleston, has created a nanotech-based weapon — nanobots that can rapidly devour any non-organic materials. His company M.A.R.S. sells four warheads to NATO, and Duke and Ripcord are tasked to deliver them. En route, their convoy is ambushed by the Baroness, played by Sienna Miller. Duke recognizes her as his ex-fiancée Ana Lewis. G.I. Joe operatives Scarlett, Snake Eyes, Breaker, and Heavy Duty rescue them.
Rachel Nichols plays Scarlett. Ray Park plays Snake Eyes. Saïd Taghmaoui plays Breaker. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje plays Heavy Duty. The warheads go to The Pit, G.I. Joe’s command center in Egypt.
The Pit, the Baroness, and Paris
General Hawk, who leads the Joes, admits Duke and Ripcord to the team only because Duke can identify the Baroness. McCullen, it turns out, is building a soldier army with that same nanotechnology, working alongside a masked figure called the Doctor, and his plan is to set off the warheads, spread panic worldwide, and install a new world order.
Storm Shadow, played by Lee Byung-hun, and the Baroness, with help from Zartan, played by Arnold Vosloo, get inside the G.I. Joe base and take the warheads.
They take the warheads to Baron DeCobray, the Baroness’s husband, to weaponize in his particle accelerator. After that, DeCobray is killed.
The Joes chase the Baroness and Storm Shadow through Paris as they launch one of the nanobot missiles. The missile hits the Eiffel Tower, destroying it, before Duke hits the kill switch — and in the process is captured and taken to McCullen’s base under the Arctic.
That Paris sequence is the film’s clearest statement of intent: a landmark destroyed, a kill switch pressed, a hero captured. It is also where the movie’s logic gives out. The nanobots eat non-organic material. The Eiffel Tower is not organic. Fine. But the film never makes the threat feel like a threat, because it never slows down long enough to let anyone react to it.
The Doctor Is Rex Lewis
McCullen loads the three remaining warheads onto missiles bound for three capitals: Beijing, Moscow, and Washington. Snake Eyes destroys one missile. Ripcord destroys the other two. Snake Eyes then duels and defeats Storm Shadow, his childhood nemesis. Duke learns that the Doctor is actually Rex Lewis, Ana’s brother, believed to have been killed by a mistimed airstrike during a mission led by Duke.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays The Doctor, also known as Rex. Jonathan Pryce plays the U.S. President. The tagline is “When all else fails, they don’t.”
The Rex reveal is the one piece of the plot with real weight behind it. Duke’s guilt over Rex’s death is the only emotional engine in the film, and it arrives in the final act, after the audience has already been asked to care about a dozen characters it barely met. Gordon-Levitt spends much of the role behind a mask. The reveal lands as information, not as a turn.
An Ensemble That Never Coheres
The cast is genuinely deep. Tatum, Wayans, Miller, Eccleston, Park, Nichols, Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Taghmaoui, Vosloo, Byung-hun, Gordon-Levitt, Pryce. That is a lot of names for 118 minutes. The film treats them as a set of interchangeable parts, and the screenplay never gives more than two of them a reason to be in the same room.
Marlon Wayans is the clearest casualty. Ripcord is written as comic relief in a movie that has no room for it — every joke lands in the middle of a firefight or a chase, and none of them are funny. Sienna Miller gets the most interesting assignment, an ex-fiancée turned enemy operative, and the film does almost nothing with it beyond one recognition scene. Christopher Eccleston plays a corrupt arms dealer, which should be a gift, and instead he spends most of the movie explaining his plan.
The action is competent and weightless. Sommers knows how to stage a chase. He does not know how to make one matter. The Paris pursuit, the Arctic base, the missile intercepts — they are all executed at the same pitch, at the same volume, with the same lack of consequence. By the time Snake Eyes fights Storm Shadow, the film has spent so much energy on noise that a genuine rivalry between two characters registers as just another fight.
A Franchise Built on the Wrong Instincts
The most telling fact about G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is not in the movie at all. It is that development started in 2003, and when the Iraq invasion began, Hasbro suggested pivoting to Transformers. That is a toy company reading the room. The G.I. Joe film that eventually got made carries the marks of that hesitation — a property handled by people who were not sure it could stand on its own, so they stuffed it with everything.
The result is a film with no center. It has a plot, and the plot is legible: McCullen builds a nanotech army, steals his own warheads back, aims them at three capitals, and gets stopped. It has a cast, and the cast is famous. It has a budget, and the budget is on screen. What it does not have is a single scene where two people talk to each other like people, or a single action beat that means anything beyond the fact that it happened.
The $302.5 million worldwide gross against a $175 million budget is the number that kept the franchise alive. That is the part worth watching, and it is also the part that should worry anyone who cares about how these movies get made. A sequel followed in 2013. In this paper’s view, the first film did not earn that sequel on quality. It earned it on volume.
KEY FACTS BOX
- Title: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
- Year: 2009
- Director: Stephen Sommers
- Screenplay: Stuart Beattie, David Elliot, Paul Lovett
- Story: Michael B. Gordon, Stephen Sommers
- Runtime: 118 minutes
- Budget: $175 million
- Worldwide gross: $302.5 million
- US release date: August 7, 2009
- Premiere: Andrews Air Force Base, July 31, 2009
- Distributor: Paramount Pictures
- Critical score: 3.2/10 (Metacritic 32/100)
- Sequel: G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013)
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is not a disaster because it is silly. Silly is fine. It is a disaster because it is incurious — about its own characters, its own premise, and its own audience. The nanobots, the masks, the stolen warheads, the brother nobody knew was alive: all of it is raw material for a movie that could have been fun. What got made instead is a two-hour trailer for a franchise that had not yet decided what it was. 3.2 of 10.
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