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38Everything in G.I. Joe: Retaliation is perfunctory - technically proficient but soulless. It's not exciting. It's boring.
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67It's well-executed technocratic action fluff. But it did leave me buzzed rather than drained.
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30I won't pretend that I had a great time watching G.I. Joe: Retaliation.
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50At times, G.I. Joe: Retaliation has a sense of its own ridiculousness — Pryce seems to be having a good time, anyway — but not enough to soften the mass death, hardware fetishism, and militaristic zeal that gets in the way of its escapist fun.
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70So fetishistic about high-powered weapons that it qualifies as an NRA wet dream, G.I. Joe: Retaliation pretty accurately reflects the franchise's comic book and cartoon origins, which is both a good and a bad thing: good if you're a 12- to 15-year-old boy, bad if you're just about anyone else.
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50The directive behind this sequel, clearly, was non-stop action. Let's think about that phrase a second. Do we really want our action movies to deliver action that does not stop? Ever? I get a little tired of action sequences that won't stop.
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38Feels like a five-year-old with a megaphone, excitedly yelling about his latest bulldozer-soldier-dinosaur smash-kill-squash-everything game.
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63Willis is at his relaxed best this time.
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40The G.I. Joe team is back, and most of their sophomore movie adventure, G.I. Joe Retaliation, is as bland as their name and as subtle as an exploding tank.
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70An action figure with a sweet core, Johnson can pump up the humanity of any franchise, whether he’s playing a stepdad who becomes a hero in Journey 2 or, as here, a stud soldier who treats Flint and Jaye like his grown children and shepherds them through peril. Following those younger Joes, the Retaliation audience is encouraged to clamber up on Johnson’s huge soldiers and go along for a pretty cool ride.
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50As long as Hollywood keeps hitting us over the head with empty spectacles like G.I. Joe: Retaliation, regular Joes will be too numb to fight back.
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40If you currently own a G.I. Joe toy or if you've dressed like a ninja at least twice since Halloween, you're going to find a lot to "hooah" about in "G.I. Joe: Retaliation."
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40Plays like a tiresomely extended evening of channel surfing.
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50Dumb fun can be, well, fun. G.I. Joe: Retaliation is way too much of the former and not nearly enough of the latter.
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50Offering a more straight-faced brand of idiocy than its cheerfully dumb 2009 predecessor, G.I. Joe: Retaliation might well have been titled “G.I. Joe: Regurgitation,” advertising big guns, visual effects and that other line of Hasbro toys with the same joyless, chew-everything-up-and-spit-it-out efficiency.
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40It's massive, all the retaliation and the world saving stuff. And it's convoluted. Frankly no one should have to think that hard to keep up with the Joes.
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25This movie never realizes how ridiculous anything it does truly is, right up to the last-second promise of another sequel.
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30The film’s director, Jon M. Chu, executes a pretty good high-altitude fight scene. Still, there should be a “Fans Only” sign at the door of every theater.
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25What's the difference between an action figure and an action star? Very little in G.I. Joe: Retaliation, which features no performances of note, even from such combat-tested thespians as Bruce Willis, Jonathan Pryce and Dwayne Johnson.
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50It’s a live-action version of on an ’80s cartoon that was designed to sell toys. This is “Transformers” without the Bumblebee Camaro, a lot of action, a few one-liners, and a lot of gunplay.
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40Fast Five was a good example of how applying The Rock to a tired series could bring it back to life. G.I. Joe, by opting for self-seriousness instead of knowing daftness, has squandered its secret weapon.
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63A more sure-footed shoot-'em-up that finds some heart, wit and perhaps enough momentum to spawn a formidable action franchise.
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38How funny that Pryce, a tweedy Brit playing a bad guy, should be the one person doing anything remotely heroic for this dud.
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70It's not enough to call this the rare franchise action movie to bring the goods; it's the even rarer one whose creators seem to understand what the goods even are.
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38The dialogue and exposition scenes in G.I. Joe are like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon from the 1980s, but the PG-13 violence is a little intense for the 7-year-old boys (and girls) who might love this stuff.
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67Retaliation is no masterpiece, but it’s a movie whose fun doesn’t feel like a four-letter word -- popcorn entertainment that not only rivals what you see during summer, but surpasses what you see from Sommers.
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Apr 3, 201330There actually is some clever dialogue in the film, especially early on between Roadblock and Duke (Tatum). But this fades over the course of the film, and too much of what the characters say sounds as though it’s been lifted verbatim from 1930s and 1940s serials.
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Mar 28, 201337Although “G.I. Joe” is merely a movie based on Hasbro toys, the action -- the real point of all this -- feels just as lifeless.
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Mar 28, 201340That G.I. Joe silliness the first film embraced has been steamrolled into tentpole flatness this time around. It’s not stoopid anymore, but just plain stupid.
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Mar 27, 201350Instead of long takes, which are lovingly utilized in Step Up 3D, Jon M. Chu opts for increasing volatility in the editing room.
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Mar 25, 201340“Rock solid,” is Bruce Willis’ nod-wink appraisal of an attack strategy in G.I. Joe: Retaliation. The film’s nowhere near as sturdy, trundling out middling action and nonsensical plotting.