GI Joe Retaliation and How It Ruined the Greatness of Sequels

G.I. Joe Retaliation and How It Ruined the Greatness of Sequels

IMDB & Rotten Tomatoes 28%

I never really wanted to watch this movie, but I was bored the other day and thought it was finally time to watch it. Especially since it came to theaters March 28, 2013 and came to DVD on July 30, 2013. The first movie was pretty good so I thought I would at least enjoy this movie a bit.

Storyline: The main storyline is about someone taking the President’s place and ordering to have the G.I. Joes killed. That is pretty much it actually; so it was a pretty simple storyline.

Now I really expect so much more from this movie, but they pretty much ruined the G.I. Joe franchise to me. Sequels should be all about getting to see characters develop, and not having to connect with an entire new cast of people!!! That is why we loved going to see the Lord of the Rings trilogy, because we got to see characters like Sam, Merry, and Pippin evolve into heroes in their own right and even watch a friendship develop between Legolas and Gimli. Just like the Harry Potter series, we got to watch all the Hogwarts students grow and become witches and wizards. This movie crushes all of that character development built in the first movie.

The only characters from the old series that they kept were Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow (and the bad guys too like Cobra Commander). So, those two were the only storylines that I really cared about, which is rough since they don’t really have a lot of dialogue parts.

Another thing that bugged me about this movie was the dialogue used. They were really trying to push the whole military lingo into every conversation. It ended up distracting me a lot. Even worse, they had the amazing actor Bruce Willis and used him as a side character. I probably would have enjoyed the movie way more if they had focused on his character (though the movie would have ended up feeling like a Red version of G.I. Joe).

Overall, this movie really didn’t impress at all. I would have rather not watched it. They made the girl G.I. Joe play the typical bombshell distraction bit which was annoying. Randomly the bad guys had a self-destruct button to end the threat which is completely ridiculous. If I was trying to destroy the world, I wouldn’t make a self-destruct button; I might make an off switch but not a button that blows up the thing that I spent so much time building! So, most of the movie was my least favorite part (minus scenes with Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow (who looks amazing!)). My favorite scene was probably when the President (in disguise) talks about blowing things up and is just calming playing Angry Birds while everyone freaks out.

Let me know if you enjoyed or disliked this movie or talk about your favorite and least favorite moments. There are other bad sequels out there so feel free to tell me your least favorite sequels that pretty much ruined a franchise. I can say some of my favorite sequels would be from the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, because I was super attached to the characters and they performed sequels the way they should be done. 

Hope you have a sequential day! (because that makes sense *sarcasm*)

These images and more can be found here: More G.I. Joe Images