One challenge requires him to try and take a bowl of water from the Arashikage Clan’s Hard Master (don’t ask) while also holding his own bowl of water and not spilling any. To join the clan, Snake Eyes must complete several “challenges of the warrior,” which seem to vary from rappelling up a wall to fighting three giant magic anacondas. When Snake Eyes saves a fellow worker, Tommy (an eerily charismatic Andrew Koji), from being executed, he’s suddenly whisked off to Tommy’s family compound near Tokyo, home to the Arashikage Clan, who have been a clandestine source of power for centuries. We then see our hero as an adult (played by the disarmingly handsome Henry Golding) working for a Yakuza boss, helping smuggle guns in fish carcasses. In the case of this movie, Snake Eyes starts off as a young boy who sees his father murdered by a group of sinister men, one of whom likes to roll a pair of dice before killing his targets. Joe really comes with an ironclad backstory gives filmmakers an unusual degree of freedom in cooking up pasts for these people they could literally be anyone from anywhere. That wasn’t what they were called, of course I’m pretending to have forgotten their actual names so that I can hang onto what little shred of dignity I have left.) Then there were my two favorites, Diving Guy and Paratrooper Guy. Joe’s because the other characters were usually blank slates distinguished primarily by their weapons and costumes and skills. If anything, we knew more about Snake Eyes’s past than we did any other G.I. Snake Eyes was always a mysterious character - not because we didn’t know much about his past, but because we couldn’t see his face and he didn’t talk.
But it feels so pro forma, so uninventive and glum, that if you told me everybody making it had an Uzi pointed at their head, I might believe you. Joe Origins, a reboot and origin story, concocting a new history for one of the more interesting members of the G.I. Joe: Retaliation, a cynical act of brand management distinguished primarily by its willingness to kill off much of the earlier film’s cast in the first act (perhaps because some of them, like Channing Tatum, had become big stars in the intervening years and didn’t want to be wedded to a never-ending G.I. That was followed by 2013’s extensively reshot G.I. Still, the 2009 Stephen Sommers picture was stupid fun, the kind of adventure you could imagine two 11-year-olds cooking up as they bashed their action figures around.
Joe nut in all of Springfield, Virginia - haven’t exactly been clamoring for a film series based on the Hasbro property. Even those of us who were devotees of the toys (and cartoons and comics) as kids - and believe me, at the age of 11, I was probably the biggest G.I.
Joe movies, surely they shouldn’t be this joyless.