Snake Eyes - GI Joe Origins

The Snake’s Progress

Snake Eyes
GI Joe Origins
Paramount Canada/USA 2021
Directed by Robert Schwentke
 
So once again, after a very long time, we have a third GI Joe film, Snake Eyes - GI Joe Origins. This one is not a sequel type of reboot (like the second movie) but a fresh reboot. I could kinda tell that because the main characters, Snake Eyes (played by played by Henry Golding) and Storm Shadow (played by Andrew Koji), are not played by the same actors from the previous films. That being said, it’s all very confusing if you try and shoehorn it into the previous movies and, frankly, they were already confusing enough.

Um... okay, the film deals with Snake Eyes, who spends his life trying to find the man who killed his father when he was a boy. Flash forward to the present and he gets himself involved with a ninja clan of ‘good guys’ who are allies of the GI Joes (represented in this movie by Samara Weaving as Scarlett) and enemies of COBRA (represented by Úrsula Corberó as The Baroness). It’s mostly about his training and moral ambiguity about who he’s really working for... and the way that question gets ultimately resolved by the end of the film.

And it’s a big, dumb blockbuster film with lots of action, not terribly credible characters and actors who look like they are trying to do their best with dialogue which, frankly, is riddled with clichés but without the requisite sense of self awareness behind the writing to allow the actors to elevate things beyond that, it seems to me. What this means is that you don’t really relate all that much to the characters either way (the moral ambiguity of the two leads really doesn’t help this) and, while there’s a lot of fun to the various action pieces... it all feels kinda flat at the same time with nothing much really at stake.

There’s another problem too, to my mind.

In one sequence, Snake Eyes slices open a cut on his hand and pushes it into a similar one from Storm Shadow, so they become blood brothers of sorts. Now, there is another motive for the title character in this scene which you’ll see very quickly after this but, the point is this... this is the only time you will see any blood spilled in the movie. Which is totally unrealistic because, the body count on this one is high and the primary fighting sequences here mostly play out with samurai swords. People getting sliced but not diced and, honestly, loads of people dying without seeming to spill a drop of blood. I mean come on... this really pushes the boundaries of credibility and is a cynical play on behalf of the filmmakers to get a lower cinema rating. And, yes, I know this film is meant to appeal to children as a huge part of the target audience but it really hurts the piece if everyone is dying by sword cuts and there’s no bleeding in sight. If you want to make a credible film for children then it’s very easy... don’t use a weapon of death which, by its very nature, raises the expectations of splashing body fluids as a direct consequence of the actions of the characters. This is too much to swallow.

Okay... this is a short review but I will say one positive in that some of the characters, including Snake Eyes, are likeable enough. That being said, I did notice a lot of the characters played by some famous actors seemed to have very flat delivery of their lines and almost no emotional content. It’s like somebody got a bunch of GI Joe action figures and breathed a semblance of life into these lumps of plastic and, as a result, their on screen presence was not much more than it would have been if we were watching said lump of plastic. For the record, due to the skill of some of these actors and actresses, I can only assume this was a deliberate piece of direction to inhabit the roles as flatly as possible so they do, in fact, more resemble the toys that they are based on. At least I hope that was the case.

However, some of the camera movements are nice, the colour schemes are good and the action choreography, bloodless as it is, is pretty exciting for a while. It’s also edited in a way which doesn’t lose you during the more fast paced scenes so, yeah, all competent movie making... just not necessarily great movie making, in this case. Oh... and believe it or not, Iko Uwais who played the lead character in both of The Raid movies has a big part in this and, considering we all know just how brilliant this guy can be, it’s sad to say that he is likeable but completely wasted in the movie. Like a lot of the cast, it has to be said.

The one thing I did think was okay was the score by Martin Todsharow... which was handy in my case because the only reason I bothered to watch this thing was because of the limited edition CD release of the score in the US. If it hadn’t got a proper CD release, I’d have to say I wouldn’t have bothered watching this one in the first place. So good on the company for at least cutting a CD deal and not giving us that compressed digital download rubbish that a lot of disrespectful companies seem to be peddling these days.

And yeah, that really is me done with Snake Eyes - GI Joe origins. It’s got action, adventure and is an okay watch... but I wouldn’t really recommend it to anyone over the age of 12, it has to be said. Now if someone would like to make a proper Action Man movie, along with an actor who can ‘do’ the eagle eyes, that would be a much more interesting proposition.

A Simple Favour

Babe Sleuth

A Simple Favour
2018 USA Directed by Paul Feig
UK cinema release print.

This film is a strange blend of two different genres and one of those genres, the girly comedy flick, is not one I would normally be caught dead watching, in all honesty. However, I saw the trailer to this one and it’s been billed as the 'darker side' of the director in question and, I have to say, it's a curious mix in that it starts off like... and is also populated by characters in... one of those typical chick flicks (in the common, popular vernacular of our time) but then turns out to be a fairly dark thriller in disguise. And it’s quite a delicate balancing act to bring those two things together but I can only applaud the people behind this for pulling that mix off so well and, as far as this audience member goes, quite successfully.

Now, to be fair, I’ve seen some very negative comments about A Simple Favour and it seems to me they’re rooted in perceptions of the collision of genres as presented here with terms such as ‘tonally all over the place’ being used and, while I can see that point to some extent, I think they’re missing the bigger picture because it’s exactly that kind of comic genre camouflage that turns what could have ended up being a fairly run of the mill thriller into something a little more interesting than what other writers and directors would have done with the material.

So, yes, it does come off as a somewhat nicey nicey cover version of Brian DePalma regurgitating Alfred Hitchcock as a girls’ night out event movie but... it’s precisely because it has that veneer of made for TV audience dramedy that it’s able to shine and give us an entertaining and somewhat satisfying ride. For example, the main protagonist Stephanie Smothers, played by Anna Kendrick, as a single mother who runs a somewhat successful vlog and who tries to help all and sundry, is so frustratingly the ‘someone I would never want to be within ten feet of’ kind of ‘nice girl next door’ that I would just not be able to stomach this kind of character in most movies (and even less so in real life). Here, though, as the story progresses, we discover a certain darkness in the character’s background and I found myself totally involved in her shenanigans because the veneer of charm hides a more than capable person underneath.

The plot centres on her new relationship with the mother of one the other kids, Emily, played by Blake Lively... and Emily’s husband Sean, played by Henry Golding. The two characters are worlds apart but as Stephanie gets drunk on Martinis and shares secrets with Emily, she becomes the only decent substitute Emily has for a passing friendship but, one day Emily calls Stephanie to pick up her kid from school before disappearing. A week or two later she turns up dead, her body washed up from a lake with signs of a large amount of heroin abuse. After a somewhat inappropriately small mourning period, Stephanie jumps into Emily’s life when she hooks up with Sean and she moves in. However, it’s not long before she begins to smell something fishy when she learns from the police that Sean took out a big life insurance policy on his wife only weeks before. Is there more going on than meets the eye here?

Well yes. I’d have to say that my one disappointment with the film was that it’s easy to figure out, about a third of the way in, that it’s a partial remake, in terms of the main part of the obvious twist, of a famous Hitchcock movie and, as such, I was waiting for certain other character revelations to be revealed at some point. A Simple Favour is based on a novel by Darcey Bell but, according to my sources (thanks IMDB) there are quite a few changes to the shape and details of the original novel so I don’t know if I can lay the Hitchcockian similarities at her door or at Jessica Sharzer’s, who wrote the screenplay. Certainly, with the absence of certain character details in the novel and a denouement much different to this adaptation, I’m guessing a lot of the ‘homage’ came from the struggle to make it more cinematic. There are certainly references to Hitchcock and also a nod to Henri-Georges Clouzot in the dialogue.

Now normally I would be very disappointed with figuring out the basic twist that early on in the film but, as I said, the shifting tone which darts between comedy and thriller really adds an entertaining element to the film because, in spite of this less than ambiguous reveal, you do get the feeling on occasion that anything could happen. It’s not 100% new territory but it is fairly uncharted and when Stephanie starts to Nancy Drew her way into finding out what’s been going on, it reminded me a little of the excellent, original Fletch movie (let’s forget the sequel, shall we?) and the wonderful series of books that was based on. There are some similarities in the way the main protagonist starts to research the death of her friend, although in Fletch the intelligence of the character was much more overt than the hidden machinations of Stephanie that Anna Kendrick really makes work in the role here.

More icing on the cake is a songtrack which involves a lot of French language pop (including Serge Gainsbourg and Bridget Bardot’s Bonnie And Clyde) and a score by Theodore Shapiro which manages to walk that tonal tightrope on which the director is balanced and provide some good support and enhancements to the movie. The French songs especially come into their own in the gorgeous looking opening and closing title sequences, which mix the kind of moving split screen style montages cribbed from certain sections of the original version of The Thomas Crown Affair with some nice, dynamic typography against the French pop-ness. It’s a heady mix and helps give the film a sense of visual/sonic branding to support the fact that, in terms of genre mixes, this kind of thing doesn’t often get done like this in contemporary cinema.

Also, the cinematographer is no slouch here and there are some great little compositions throughout. All of the houses that people are living in are beautiful and seem to be several pay grades above what certain characters could afford but the internal architecture of these ‘rich people dwellings’ is used nicely to highlight and compartmentalise the people who travel through the space in a way that can set them psychologically apart from each other in certain scenes before bringing them closer in others. There’s some good stuff going on here and it’s another thing which helps glue the two different styles of movie making going on here together and helps the audience accept this for what it is.

And that’s me done with this one. I wasn’t really expecting A Simple Favour to be any good and, given the ambition of what the writer and director have tried to do with this cross-pollination of styles, it really shouldn’t have been. I found it really entertaining, though and I’d actually see this one again at some point in the future. There are a lot worse things playing at the cinema at the moment so maybe catch up to this one if you like thrillers or female centric comedies... this one gives you the best of both worlds.