Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins

Disclaimer - the render is being removed from my house. It is loud and messy (and unexpected) so I needed a plan to escape for a few hours. So I went to the cinema and saw the only appropriate movie I hadn't already seen.

The fact the staff were genuinely surprised they had a customer for the showing wasn't entirely unusual (I often attend the first show of the day) but the fact they hadn't even turned on the escalator demonstrated their expectations I think. They weren't wrong. I had the theatre to myself.

I know very little about the G.I. Joe mythos. I watched that Channing Tatum movie a few years ago and recently remembered there was a sequel starring The Rock that seems to have been scrubbed from my memory. I never read the comics though - which are held in high esteem by a corner of the geek community.

I knew going in that Snake Eyes was some kind of cool looking ninja character who never/rarely speaks and was a 'good guy' which a nemesis who dresses in white who is part of COBRA - the baddies. That is about it.

Henry Golding plays the title character and unlike his comics namesake he never stops speaking...really terrible dialogue. Golding is a decent actor and a ridiculously good looking bloke but he ought to have a word with his agent.

If this had come out on the 80s during the flood of ninja-ploitation movies this would have been considered too cliched. Now I don't know what to think. This must have been a design choice. I remember 'Black Rain' starring Micheal Douglas in the late '80s and thinking it already looked cliched - this isn't even that nuanced.

Neon lit, rain drenched streets. High performance motorcycles. Huge traditional Japanese estates looking like something from the 1800s. Yakuza in fleets of blacked out SUVs. So many swords.

There are a couple of well staged fight scenes that pretty much book-end things - though the extent to which they are bloodless is kind of unnerving.

Even for a comic-book movie the plot makes zero sense. Snake Eyes is clearly the one in the wrong from the majority of the movie and yet it turns on its head in next to know time at the end. Daenerys' descent into madness was given more time ;)

Also you can smell the desperation of the producers to launch a new franchise. It is off-putting.

I suspect this has killed off any chance Golding had of getting the Bond gig.

I doubt anyone was planning to see this at the cinema - but I'd even save your bandwidth when it reaches streaming.