As regular readers know, I have a high tolerance for modern blockbuster movies and their specific foibles. Still, I have no problem judging this one to be one of the more pointless pieces of overbudgeted crap I’ve encountered in my time.
Apparently, Hasbro is hankering after its own Hasbro Cinematic Universe (stop laughing!), and decided to start it with…an origins spin-off about a popular G.I. Joe character. Directed by Robert Schwentke, director of completely personality-free and nearly painfully mediocre highish budget mush like R.I.P.D. and RED. And indeed, Schwentke here continues to show a complete lack of personality or style as a director, not exactly doing much wrong on a technical level, but never doing anything right or just interesting either. He’s also really great at getting disinterested performances out of perfectly decent actors, like everyone in this one’s cast.
Clearly, you don’t want to start out your Hasbroverse with anything that’s entertaining or even vaguely ambitious.
The film does remind me of the terrible first Wolverine movie in Fox’s X-Men universe a lot more than of anything Marvel has put out, in that its script consists exclusively of clichés anybody in the market for this kind of film will have seen used better in a hundred other films, dragged out interminably. Worse, it really wants to have all of the clichés, and so trundles off in twelve different directions, one after the other. There, the film finds nothing of interest but certainly uses every opportunity to slow things down to a crawl, and turn about seventy minutes of usable stuff into a two hour movie that never seems to end.
It also suffers from an inexplicable need to explain any old nonsense about Snake Eyes, though, admittedly, there’s nothing in here quite as pointless as the origin of Wolverine’s leather jacket. On the other hand, Wolverine’s leather jacket never decided that a stone that spits a bit of fire is a horrible super weapon, unlike this one.
On the plus side, the Hasbroverse can only get more interesting after Snake Eyes, if it survives a first outing quite this lacking in personality and reason to exist.
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