25. ICONOCLADS: Features a character that you have dressed up as for Halloween.
It’s been 15 years and I am still angry about this movie.
Beyond my obsession with film, I am a lifelong G.I. Joe collector. Yes, the first night my later wife stayed at my house, she had to walk through a hallway of HISS tanks and I was unashamed to show her my collection of Cobra troops.
To answer the challenge for this film, yes, I have dressed as Cobra Commander.
There are two worlds of G.I. Joe. There’s the cartoon series, which nearly everyone knows, in which lasers never kill anyone. And then there’s the Marvel comic, written by Larry Hama, in which death is a very real fact that these soldiers face every day. It’s also how my brother learned how to read, as he has dyslexia and my mother would read the comic with him almost every night.
G.I. Joe is more important than just a toy line or a room in my basement where I have an aircraft carrier. It was a big deal to me that my pacifist parents allowed me to have military toys, but once there were ninjas and my mother realized the subversive nature of the file cards and comics that Hama wrote, I went all in on this toyline. It was a way of me meeting people from places I’d never seen and embracing a team that had all races, creeds and genders. Before diversity was a buzzword, G.I. Joe had already done it.
For years, a movie had been discussed. Sure, there’s the animated film in which Cobra Commander becomes a snake — “Once a man!” — but a live action movie. Directed by Stephen Sommers from a screenplay by Stuart Beattie, David Elliot and Paul Lovett, the 2009 movie would explain how Duke (Channing Tatum) became part of the Joe team and how Military Armaments Research Syndicate would give way to Cobra.
Immediately, as a total geek, I didn’t like this. MARS is Destro’s company and in the classic continuity, he sells weapons to both sides. That’s why his family wears the silver masks, as it symbolizes the fact that one of the earliest members of the McCullen family was caught selling weapons to both sides of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms by Cromwell’s men. That’s way cooler than the cartoon, which in the episode “Skeletons in the Closet,” the legend is told that one of Destro’s ancestors was accused of witchcraft and forced to wear a silver mask. Ever since, the family has defiantly worn similar masks.
I was trying to keep an open mind, though.
Duke — Conrad Hauser — and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) — Wallace Weems — are guarding four nanotech enabled warheads sold by MARS and Destro (Christopher Eccleston) when they’re attacked by Anastascia “The Baroness” DeCobray (Sienna Miller).
A sidebar: As a yinzer, I am duty ordered to remind you fuck Sienna Miller for saying, “Can you believe this is my life? Will you pity me when you’re back in your funky New York apartment and I’m still in Pittsburgh? I need to get more glamorous films and stop with my indie year,” and calling the Steel City Shitsburgh in a Rolling Stone interview. And now she’s playing the reason why I have always dated women with glasses?
They meet General Clayton “Hawk” Abernathy (Dennis Quaid), Shana “Scarlett” M. O’Hara (Rachel Nichols), Abel “Breaker” Shaz (Saïd Taghmaoui), Snake Eyes (Ray Park) and Hershel “Heavy Duty” Dalton (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and go to The Pit, the Joe’s center of operations.
This is all well and good until the movie decides to give the Joes cyborg suits that let them run faster and jump high. It’s like they’re making a movie from a whole different property. And then, despite a Storm Shadow (Lee Byung-hun) and Zartan (Arnold Vosloo) that aren’t all that bad, we learn that Cobra Commander is Rexford G. Lewis, also known as The Doctor, also the Baroness’ brother, also Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Also: Duke and the Baroness almost got married a long time ago when she was just Ana Lewis.
Instead of the comic hood that the creators of this movie found too reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan, Cobra Commander would have prosthetic makeup under a mask.
I knew all of this going in, but I could not be prepared for what I received.
And look, I know this should be a kid’s movie, but you know how people flip out over religious-themed movies that get it wrong? This is that for me.
At least it wasn’t the early script that had Scarlet married to Action Man and no Cobra. Or the idea that they were based in Brussels and the name meant Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity.
If you think I hated this, the cast disliked it even more. Eccleston stated, “Working on something like G.I. Joe was horrendous. I just wanted to cut my throat every day.” Tatum only made the movie to fulfill a contract. And Miller said, “The whole thing was a bit of a disaster from start to finish.”
When the sequel, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, was released, Duke died in the first few minutes. I saw that in a room full of wild Joe fans and nervous Hasbro execs and man, you’ve never seen a group of people run from an audience instead of doing a Q and A after a movie.
And yes, that is Brendan Fraser as Sgt. Stone, not the G.I. Joe Extreme or Sigma Six character, but a descendant of Rick O’Connell, the hero from The Mummy that was played by Fraser.
This movie reminds me of the pre-MCU comic movies, where executives and filmmakers did whatever they wanted instead of using the source material in the comics. At least Hama got a paycheck as a story consultant.
Both of those movies and the delay to add 3D for the second, led to multiple years of no G.I. Joe product on the shelves. I always said about these movies, “At least I get new toys.” These were so bad that I didn’t get anything new for five years.
At least this wasn’t G.I. Joe Origins: Snake Eyes.
B&S About Movies 
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