So sometimes, and lately a lot of the time, I don’t want to watch anything too involved. I want background noise. Something dumb. Pretty colors. Pretty women. Pretty men. Dope action. I want numb. Usually, you know what kind of movie that is. I saw Aliens vs Predator and Aliens vs Predators 2, and I was right on the money for both. Then I avoided watching Triangle of Sadness and picked Snake Eyes.
Let’s get this out of the way: No, this movie is not a 2 hour POV of a snake slithering around. And yes, this is a GI Joe movie. They say, “yo, Joe!” It is not grounded in any scientific basis. Shut up.
Hints of Brilliance? In a GI Joe Movie? No way, Joe-say!
That being said, Snake Eyes was… surprisingly good- kind of like how that new Mortal Kombat movie surprised me. It’s a stylish film, with a straightforward, unassuming plot. The framing is fine. The cinematography is unfairly good. The action pays homage to Korean and Thai action films of late. Then we have to sit through the necessary GI Joe stuff.
I was trying to write something on my computer and I didn’t want to do it in complete silence, so I figured the new GI Joe movie would do the trick. I remembered seeing the other two (there are two. They are bad.), and felt that I really needed more of that shit meant to sell toys, y’know? There’s something about my inner child that’s never really gone away. Avid readers will know my obsession with the Transformers movies, my inordinately long review for Battleship, and I did get swept up in the Barbenheimer hype. So yeah, let’s do this. I want it. Do it to me. Do upon me.
The movie started fairly generically, with one tiny bit that jerked my attention. So, the bad guy kills the good guy’s dad, and he rolls some loaded dice to see if the dad lives or dies. When the dice rolls two ‘ones’, also known as ‘snake eyes’, the bad guy literally says, “snake eyes”. Fuck. But before that, there’s a clever technique where the kid is hiding in a room that is perpendicular to the hallway. On the inside of the door is a mirror, facing the kid. When the kid props open the door a crack, from the sliver of the reflection, he can see the front door, where most of the showdown between the bad guy and his father goes down.
That’s clever. That’s not easy to figure out. That’s something you’d expect from a more mature film or a more mature director- or at least from a filmmaker who’s involved and passionate about the film he’s making. This little trick isn’t a big deal. It’s not groundbreaking or anything, but it betrays a level of thought. Two degrees of thinking beyond the surface level. It grabbed my attention.
This theme of nuance buried under the obvious layer of shallow, PG-13 gratuity persists throughout the film. When the GI Joe version of Black Widow (confusingly known (since 2010) as Scarlett) fights nameless bad guys who follow her into the bathroom, she props her cell phone up on her suitcase as she’s currently on a video call. Not only is this introduction used to deliver the expositional tie-in to the greater GI Joe lore, but it also does something they didn’t have to do. The phone falls over. They didn’t have to do it. They didn’t have to film the relatively complicated movement of a camera falling to stimulate what it looked like to the people on the other line when her phone is knocked over in the middle of a video call. But they did. That being said, a lot of this scene was pretty clunky, especially when it came to getting into the exposition. The dialogue was blocky and weird, and in retrospect, I suspect that they made this film, and then were forced to shoehorn in a bit more GI Joe stuff.
Martial Arts, Action Figures, Action Arts
At around the same time, the Cobra agent Baroness is introduced (very obviously a bad guy, because obviously snakes = bad)(but not Snake Eyes the character, as he is actually a good guy snake eyes = good)(got it?).
Then there’s the fight choreography. There’s a well known example of that movie Taken which relies on a lot of shaky cam and numerous cuts to “stimulate” action, a technique which was also used to far better effect in the first three Bourne movies. Most modern films don’t pay much attention to the craft of the action, and use this camera technique as a crutch. Elite action films, like the popular John Wick films, go back to the roots, and don’t do that so much, instead allowing the action to be demonstrated in its full without an abundance of edits. The film The Raid does this as well, which allows us longer shots of the physical violence, grounding it in a sense of visceral reality.
I’m not saying Snake Eyes is like John Wick in disguise, but it’s somewhere in the middle. It’s squarely in the middle, shackled by its PG-13 rating. I sincerely believe that if this film was Rated R, the action would have been stellar. There’s a lot of martial arts and swordfighting in this film, and even a quick flash of gun-fu, and it’s such. A fucking. Tease. It’s right on the cusp of being fucking amazing, and the actor’s movements flow just enough for us to hope that we get the full movement. There can’t be any blood or dismemberments or really carnal violence due to the film’s catalyst being toy sales for teen boys, but boy do I think this film wanted to do it.
More so than that, the action sets as well are just so extra. There’s no reason for them to have had fifty sword-wielding yakuza fighting off Snake Eyes and a Japanese man named Tommy. But they did it. They fucking did it. Then, those fifty yakuza stab the shit out of the truck the two are escaping on. What the shit. That’s so badass. I can’t even describe that scene for you, because you just have to see it. It’s so gratuitous and extra and imaginative, and that kind of thing really only comes into play when you’re watching martial arts films made in Asia.
Then there’s the cinematography, which isn’t always stellar, but when it’s good, it’s fucking bombastic. There are basically only real sets in this film, and a ton of built or scouted environments. The green screen is reserved for really outlandish stuff, and I can honestly only recall it being a thing in two scenes, both of which completely deserved the usage. One of those scenes is a long fight on a speeding highway, where our main characters jump between motorcycles and cars and trucks to deliver devastating blows of their swords, and do karate on moving vehicles. 12 year old me would have loved that shit. I still loved it.
All Good Things Must End
The movie loses its legs in the climax, I think. The hint of awkwardness that first presents itself in the aforementioned GI Joe lore dump amplifies in the end. One of the main antagonists gets really goofy, like, outlandishly goofy. He’s like a cartoon. There was no reason to for him to be so over-the-top. It was jarring. Then, there’s a grandma character, wearing a tight kimono, skittering around during the main battle, and they make this lady run a lot. A lot. And it’s unbelievably silly. Then she does karate with some fans, and I just lost my shit. It was dumb.
There’s also a dumb ‘hero shot’ where all the good guy-aligned people emerge from the cottages and line up to face the bad guy for a final showdown, and it’s pretty much exactly like that female team-up shot during the final battle of Avengers: Endgame. That’s also when someone says, “yo, joe!”
My final issue, which confounded me as to why it ended up being an issue, is when one of the protagonists is slighted, and is denied his birthright. In turn, he decides to go full evil and join Cobra, all the while telling Snake Eyes he’s going to kill him (again, snake = bad, snake eyes = good. Keep up.) This character doesn’t really have many hints of him going evil throughout the film. He’s pretty flat and blocky, and pretty much just a plot device in most aspects. I wish his turn to evil was better foreshadowed.
Verdict
So that’s where this film leaves me. Irritated a fucking GI Joe movie did not have foreshadowing. Because it totally could have. It totally could have, and I totally expected it. My expectations were that high. That we were going to have foreshadowing. This is coming from a guy who has an annual rewatch of a movie with a soundtrack titled, “Einstein’s Wrong”.
So should you watch this movie? I mean maybe? If you’re a dude, and your expectations are low, and you want your fix of action, but also not like, dumb action? If you want to be pleasantly surprised? If you’re not too worried about character development or anything? I mean maybe? Again, Snake Eyes was surprisingly good. Not just entertaining, but actually good good. Well-rounded. Fundamentally sound + some extras.
YMMV
You can stream Snake Eyes on Hulu.
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