And you try to be a nice guy … I’ve been willing to excuse The Rock’s transformation back to Dwayne Johnson so long as he still rocks. But when you produce a rock-solid turd that sinks like a stone, well, I’m gonna have to say that Snitch didn’t exactly do it for me, either.
Now, if you were The President, wouldn’t you feel the slightest bit silly ordering, “get me the G.I. Joes!” I’d expect to follow it with: “… and Mr. Potato Head, and goddamnit get me the My Little Ponies, ASAP! We have to face down North Korea right now!”
Yes, the Joes are back.
♪Gotta have a Joe for this Joe for that.
This runnin’ with the Joes, boy, just ain’t where it’s at ♫
And there isn’t a thing we can do about it. In G.I. Joe: Retaliation, the Joes get framed *gasp* And are denounced by the President (Jonathan Pryce). I gotta give it up for anybody who can play this part with a straight face – you’re the President of the United States, but you’re also an imposter posing as the President, and you call public hearings to announce things about G.I. Joes. Personally, I couldn’t say a single word of that without bursting into laughter. Mr. Pryce, you are a true professional.
The Joes, of course, are widely renowned throughout this film as great soldiers. So it’s up to the Cobra Commander guys to get rid of them. Three regular Joes survive the ambush where we lose head Joe, Channing Tatum (is this your new thing, pal? You just gonna die every film a half hour in? And why couldn’t you do that in Magic Mike?); as the Joes got blamed for the ambush where they died. –oh, you’ll hurt your head trying to make any sense of this tripe—they now have to go incognito. Default leader Roadblock (Johnson. I never thought of that – is “Rock” short for “Roadblock?”) tells his gang they are dead to the world until they can make this thing right. Naturally, the first thing he does is contact old friends from his neighborhood. I guess you’re just dead to the part of the world that includes your wife and daughters. Guided to a condemned gymnasium, the Joes 
find conditions adequate enough to infiltrate the Presidency, including computer hacking without an internet connection from what appears at first look to be a Commodore 64. Wait. It could have been a TRS-80.
Meanwhile, in another bad film, Snake Eyes (Ray Park) has to extract his evil step-brother from Tibet. This is a franchise in which “Cobra Commander” = bad guy, but “Snake Eyes” = good guy. The transporting a consciousness-challenged body from the Himalayas while fighting dudes vertically from dangling ropes gives a dimension to suspension of disbelief heretofore unknown. And I haven’t even described Bruce Willis getting into the act.
Once Tatum Channing “Channing Tatum” is lost, all semblance of even mock-human conversation flies south for the winter. And then we get action. Big, pointless action. Occasionally you’ll get a clue whom to root for. Not quite as occasionally, you may even care. I suppose it’s possible for one to like this film if all you care about is action. Not action that serves any purpose, of course, just action. Now imagine my review has just exploded into the words, “it sucked!” *Boom*
The Prez is some disguised Stalin
Special forces need to be callin’
The battle ensues
Over nuclear abuse
Oh wait, that was Olympus Has Fallen
Rated PG-13, 110 Minutes
D: Jon M. Chu
W: Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick
Genre: Blowing s*** up
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Kids who play with army men, I guess
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: National leaders, and all of their subjects
